


The Spaces Between

by megamazing



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Clint Needs a Hug, Eventual Smut, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Phil Needs a Hug, Pre-Slash Stevetony, Reunions, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, clint centric, everyone needs a hug or seven, flashback scenes, melting pot of canon, references to past passive deathwish mentality, sporadic phil POV, thorbruce if you squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-07-15 00:06:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 44,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16051382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megamazing/pseuds/megamazing
Summary: Phil’s been dead for three years when Clint sees him, the very real and alive him, in the middle of New York during an Avengers battle. Then Clint gets shot, because it turns out that staring blankly at a supposedly dead ex-handler you were (are?) in love with is not a solid field strategy.No one knew what Clint and Phil were to each other before the Battle of New York. As it turns out, ‘no one’ included the two of them. This is where bottling your feelings gets you.(Or, the one where Phil’s secret gets blown wide open, the past is dredged up, and Kate has to be the bearer of brutal honesty. Again.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Is this a Reuniting-Post-TAHITI fic? Yep. This is also a fic I wrote purely for me, because in all honesty, I’m not sure anyone in this fandom is desperate for another one. Except for me. I wanted it.
> 
> It’s a melting pot of MCU and the stuff I love in comics. A v smart and kind friend asked me how the battle of New York could have happened 3 years ago, but somehow Kate exists as Hawkeye, meaning Clint would have had to die and come back, meaning Avengers Disassembled happened? And becoming Ronin? And Cap!Clint? 
> 
> The short answer is not exactly. Longer answer: after an intense battle, Clint was presumed dead, Kate took the mantle, Clint came back without doing the Ronin/Cap thing, he took a break then rejoined the team, and now they’re all friends again. In other words, I’ve written things that make less sense, so I’m just rolling with it.
> 
> (this fic was also set up before I fell in love with the Bucky and Clint friendship, but editing that in is more than I’m up for rn, so he only lives here in spirit. soz Buck, ily, I swear.)

**CLINT/PHIL**

The mission was so close to all going according to plan.

That changed in the space of five otherwise insignificant minutes. But really, it changed the moment he turned his head.

In those minutes: Hulk drop-kicked a robot through a wall; Widow completed a double take-down of the operators controlling said robot; Cap was in the middle of fighting off the small militia supposedly guarding those operators; Iron Man was handling the jet plane rapidly falling from the sky; Daisy and Mac were evacuating a group of Inhumans from the same apartment building Hulk had just destabilized; and May was in the process of neutralizing the Inhuman SHIELD had come to New York for in the first place.

Naturally, the two teams had no idea the other would be operating in the same area at the time. The Avengers didn’t know the small group of SHIELD agents even existed. In fact, they might have gone on that way for years, if only he hadn’t turned his head.

When he did, when he made that one tiny mistake that nearly them cost everything, he looked straight into the one pair of eyes he had never planned to see in person.

The problem was that Clint had been fighting off the enemy sniper in those five minutes. He’d been forced out of his perch and right into the chaos.

The problem was that Phil had been forced out into the middle of the street, trying to coordinate his team around the mess the Avengers were making after the van had been blown up.

In the end, their intentions don’t matter because the result is the same. They locked eyes. The sniper took his shot and because Clint had glanced to the left – glanced and felt every inch of his skin crawl at the sight before him – because of that, Clint was half a second short on his draw.

The sniper fell, but so did Hawkeye: blown back by the force of the enemy shot, practically flying the few feet it took before his head cracked and bounced off the sidewalk on the other side.

Never count on a mission going according to plan with five minutes left.

\----

**CLINT**

The last words he heard before the black drowned out the world were two of the same, both a shouted:  _Hawkeye!_  Two voices, a man and a woman. One by his side and one in his ear. It felt eerily like being thrown back in time, but now the voices were reversed.

It was funny. This was how he used to imagine he would go, if he were dumb enough to get himself shot.

\----

**PHIL**

“Hawkeye!” The name was out of his mouth before he could think to stop it. His feet were moving, running, before he could remind them that  _he was supposed to be dead,_ as far as any of Hawkeye’s team knew _._ He was dead as far as Hawkeye knew, too. Phil felt the blood drain from his face – he probably looked pale enough to pass for a ghost, and wasn’t that hilarious?

It wasn’t.

“Coulson, status?” May’s voice demanded through their commlink. She’d likely heard his outburst and was already rallying her  _I told you so_  speech, but he didn’t care, could hardly think past the rush of  _Clint-here-not moving_  going through his head.

“He’s down,” Coulson told her, dropping painfully to his knees by Clint’s side the second he was close enough. “Hawkeye, can you hear me?” He was proud of his voice for coming out in a professional, commanding tone even as he felt his insides shaking.

A steady stream of blood was dripping from the place Clint’s tactical vest ended at the shoulder, and the wound right below the chest plate was filling and spilling over with it. He didn’t know enough about Stark’s modifications to be able to ascertain what kind of weapon could have been able to blow straight through it like that, and he was almost afraid to find out.

Phil ripped off his jacket and tried to compress the wound, to slow the flow of blood even a little, but he was wary of broken ribs, unable to take off the vest to get a better look.

Clint just lay there, motionless and unresponsive aside from that slight pulse that was just enough to keep Phil from a breakdown.

Suddenly, with less warning than there should have been for the amount of noise the damn suit made, Iron Man was dropping down on the other side of Clint (he blamed his lack of observational skills on the distraction of having Clint so close after so long and now bleeding out under his bare hands).

“God dammit, Clint,” Tony’s voice pipped out through the helmet in a mechanical way Phil thought he had forgotten, but hearing it wasn’t as unsettling as he thought it’d feel in the three years since the last time he’d heard it up close. Then again, maybe that was down to the blood flowing through his fingers. “Get over it, Cap, his shit’s been leaked to the world for months, now. I think I can use his name this one time, as he bleeds out on the street in front of me,” Tony snarked, bending down on the other side of Clint. “Thanks for the help, man,” Tony said in Phil’s general direction

“Don’t mention it.”  _Literally, please_ , Phil thought. “It looks like a bullet went through his tactical suit, he needs medical attention immediately.”

Tony’s head snapped up as fast as Phil imagined the clunky mechanical neck would allow, and the mask looked eerily still as Tony stared at Phil. Phil could almost picture the wide-eyed look Tony had on under there, but he didn’t have the time, nor did he give enough of a shit, to revel in catching Tony Stark off guard. “Oh fuck,” Tony muttered. “I’m not going crazy. I am  _not_  going crazy right now, that would be phenomenal timing, even for me.”

Phil decided to ignore that, and continued to relay information as quickly as he could. If Start wasn’t listening, hopefully the Captain would be from the other end of their comm-link. “Sniper shot, fifteen feet north of our position and skyward,” he said, forcing his voice into Director-Mode despite feeling as if the air had been knocked from his lungs.

If he expected to get more obnoxious rambling from Tony, he was mistaken.

“Fuck you very much,” Tony said. Slightly robotic voice or not, the harsh tone was as much of a slap as Phil ever thought it would be, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from Clint’s slack face. “I’m taking him to medical,” Tony continued, and Phil wasn’t sure whether the information was for him or the other Avengers. 

\----

**THREE YEARS AGO**

When Natasha’s smile fell, Clint felt it in his gut. One minute she was teasing about how easy he must have been to brainwash with so little brain capacity available, and the next she looked…almost like she was trying not to cry.

Very few things were allowed to slip past Natasha’s iron-clad defenses, and almost nothing ever did, especially in a carefully monitored SHIELD facility. It was more than enough to put Clint on high alert, enough to feel an absence growing bigger with every passing moment. He sat up straighter in the bed and had to work past a growing lump of dread to ask, “Tash…where’s Phil?”

She looked him right in the eyes, the strongest person he’d ever known, and he knew the answer before she said it. Rather, he assumed she said it, but he couldn’t hear past the roaring in his ears. It was like he’d gone under Loki’s spell again, the world dropping into fuzzy background noise. He couldn’t feel the sheet under his hands, he felt numb.

Her hand on his chest shocked him out of it, and he saw real fear in Natasha’s eyes. He was breathing too heavy, too quickly, to speak, so he shook his head.  _No._

“Was it me?” he rasped. He was panicked – he didn’t know, he didn’t  _know._

Natasha took his hand and squeezed hard enough that her knuckles went white. “No, you were higher up and nowhere near them. I know. I was the one who fought you off.”

Clint knew he was shaking but he couldn’t give less of a shit about how it might have looked. He didn’t cry, though. Not a drop. He wondered why that was with a detached sort of curiosity in the corner of his mind.

Somehow, hatefully, he knew she was wrong. Clint couldn’t remember it all, hardly anything, but he remembered the plan that had been forced into his head. He remembered his job had been to take down anyone he saw who may have had the chance to ruin it.

 _Phil_.

Something deep in him broke. It was like a piece of him was just out of reach, and he could  _see_  it, feel the phantom heat of it, but he couldn’t touch it. He wouldn’t, not ever again.

\----

**AFTER**

He woke up, slowly, to the clinical stillness of a hospital room, and the feeling of being watched. He would have panicked, but a firm, reassuring sound immediately came from his left side. Natasha. He let out a breath and winced. His chest was sore on the outside, and burning from the inside, like fiery little razors slicing his flesh with every movement.

“You need another dose,” she said, loud enough for his bad ear.

“No-” he started, eyes flying open, but she cut him off with a glare and pursed lips.

“I don’t want a repeat of the last nine hours, do you?”

“Nine?” he asked with another aborted wince. Damn, he had to be more careful not to move his torso. It definitely felt like a broken rib or two.

She twisted the knob on his IV and he watched her staring down the tube as the clear liquid began to drip. The beeping pulse monitor kicked up a few notches and Clint silently cursed it, even as he felt the nervous energy thrumming along his spine to kick it up a few more notches. Fuck hospitals. And medicine. What good had they ever done, anyway?

Natasha sat back down, but moved the chair closer to the bed, kicking her feet up next to Clint’s hand so that he could lay it over her ankle. He gave her a squeeze, silently thanking her for being there. Logically, he knew whenever he woke up in a hospital bed outside of the Tower, Nat wouldn’t be far behind. Unfortunately, his anxiety around hospitals – of anything that might interfere with his consciousness and agency – didn’t give a damn about promises they had made to each other years ago, nor the ones made three years back.

She knew all that without him having to say. He loved her more for it.

What he didn’t love was the look he could tell she was sending him before he even opened his eyes.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I know you want to say it.”

“You’re a fucking moron.”

He waited for the rest, but she was pointedly quiet. He peeked open an eye. “That’s all?” His voice was still a little wheezy, and he knew asking for water could set her off. He did it anyway.

She gave him a flat look but swung her feet off and got up to get it, nonetheless. She poured it silently from an ugly beige pitcher on the wheelie table, and he wasn’t quite sure whether that was a good sign or a bad one. It would probably depend on how bad his injury was, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to ask that question yet. The less he knew, the easier it would be to convince himself that he could make it out of this place by dinner time.

She held the cup for him while he took slow, careful sips. He wasn’t a fucking armature at being invalided off the field; he knew for as good as it felt going down, it would hurt a hundred times worse choking it back up if he took too much, too quickly.

When he was done, she set the cup within his arm’s reach and sat down, kicking her feet back up on the bed. The way she was staring at him, he could tell something was coming. He wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted to hear it – whether he would rather have the confirmation that he was insane, or that the last three years of his life had been built on a lie.

About the time he could feel the medicine start to make itself known with fuzziness in his head and numbness in his chest, she finally said: “What did you see?”

The truth got stuck in his throat. “What makes you think I saw anything?”

“Because I watched it happen. You missed the enemy’s shot at you when you looked away. You made yours, but not soon enough to avoid getting hit with a poisoned bullet. Right in the chest,” she added pointedly.

“Yeah, that part I remember vividly,” he mumbled.

“I hope it hurts.”

He winced. “Was it that bad?”

Her nose twitched. “I couldn’t be there for entire operation. I had to…run interference. But I was back in time to hear about the seizures.” 

Clint’s sympathetic wince turned into a genuine one as the shrug of his shoulders disrupted the stitches in his chest. He didn’t bother asking more about whatever they’d done to get him back online and not bleeding out on the streets of Midtown. “How long did Fury and Hill go at the team this time?”

“I want cake,” was all she answered, and that pretty much said it all.

“I’ll get you all the cake I can fit in Stark’s off-roader.” Sounded like she deserved it. But there was something else about what she’d said that struck a bad chord. “What was that about running interference?”

The small bit of ease he’d seen in the set of her shoulders since he’d woken was gone in an instant. A deliberately relaxed Natasha was terrifying, but with her shoulders tensed like that, while they were the only ones in a single-bed hospital room (and Stark must have pulled serious strings for that shit on short notice), Clint knew she was worried. And a worried Natasha was never a good sign.

She studied him instead of responding, like she was waiting for a signal.

“Nat..?” he prompted.

“Clint. Before I say anything, I need to know what you saw. We heard you curse over the comms seconds before you went down. Don’t bullshit me.” His eyes flicked toward the door and she caught it, because of course she did. Nat shook her head. “The room is secure, no one in or out until I press the button for a nurse.”

He felt a new lump start forming in his throat. He didn’t know why he couldn’t just say it. He wanted to, wanted to scream it and go running for the goddamn hills (or back to the place he’d seen Phil, or the  _hallucination_  of Phil, because it had to have been a hallucination – a fucking psychotic break, left over from Loki, or some other asshole's bad juju).

“How’d you manage to make Stark and Captain Guilty Conscience promise to keep out?” He choked out instead. The Avengers had an annoying habit of trying to  _be there_  for one another, despite every single one of them being as emotionally unavailable as they come, except for maybe Sam. And even though Clint may have been guilty of it when it came to the others, it was annoying as hell when it was directed toward him.

She quirked an eyebrow at him, and that was enough of an ‘ _are you kidding me?’_   answer to put a stop to his stalling. He had the feeling he’d be paying for this next time they sparred, but the words felt too heavy to force out the way she wanted him to.

“I lost focus,” he admitted.

“What happened,” she repeated. This time her voice was less harsh, but it still felt like a kick in the heart. He could feel that bubble of all the impossible wishes and dreams he’d been bottling and shoving to the side for so long trying to shove its way back to the forefront and he  _couldn’t_  handle that. Not now. Not when he’d worked so hard to make the facade of being a functioning human a reality. And yet…

“I went off the god-damned reservation, is what happened.”

“If you were having an attack, I would have noticed,” she argued definitively. “This wasn’t an episode.”

He shut his eyes as his last, twisted hope was dashed. It was sick, that he would hope that his mind was being taken over again, and it warred with the completely contradictory need to cry with relief. He cleared his throat painfully, resisting the urge to clutch his chest at the pain. “Gotta be something. Can’t have seen what I saw.”

“Why?”

Clint almost laughed, but the puff of air that took its place felt like claws ripping apart his chest from the inside, so it ended up coming out more like a strangled cough. “You know. I know you know. You’re just…” another cough that must have sounded just as bad as it felt, because Nat was out of her seat with two fingers on the inside of his wrist despite the monitor, checking his pupils the next second. “‘M fine, Tash.”

She had her blank-slate face on, and she pulled back just to cross her arms at him. Her left eyebrow twitched.

He rolled his eyes, and nope – ouch. Bad idea. He definitely had to add a concussion to his list of problems, then. “I’m fine for the circumstances,” he amended.

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“You just want me to keep talking so you can evaluate the extent of the damage for yourself.”

“And?” That left eyebrow was fully arched now.

He sighed. Sighing seemed doable, compared to the laughing. He might not have given her a real answer if it wasn’t for the full-course meal of drugs that were pumping into his veins. God, he hated drugs. Never led anywhere he wanted to be.

Clint looked away. “It can’t be him,” he said, finally. “If it’s him, what does that mean? Does it mean he’s been hiding from us? Three years, and not a peep. Not sure I want to think about what that says about me. Him. Us. Fuck, you know what I mean. It  _can’t_  be him, Tasha, it can’t.” Clint didn’t say anything for a moment, then he whispered reluctantly, like she was pulling the truth out of him with hooks, “but, shit, I want it to be.”

Natasha sat down on the bed, facing him, her leg tucked under her and her thigh pressed against his. She didn’t say anything to that, just took his hand in a tight grip. She didn’t ask who the  _him_  was, and that…that said it all, didn’t it?

Right about then is when the tears started to sting.

“Fuck,” he whispered again. The sound came out too sharp for his chest to handle, but he couldn’t seem to care about how it hurt. He didn’t have to ask if she was fucking with him: this was Natasha. She’d fuck with him about anything but this. Not Phil.  _Fuck._

“It was him,” she affirmed softly. He looked up and saw a shine to her eyes, the way it blurred the bottom edges of her irises, and he pulled her by the hand into a crushing hug. He could feel the spike and burn from the pull on the stitches in his chest, the heat from the pain hardly dulled by the meds, but it only made him hold her tighter before his right arm went numb and fell loose on its own.

“He’s  _alive_ , Nat… Oh, god.” 

She was whispering in his ear, quick mixes of reassuring Russian and English that he didn’t have to parse out to understand.

His throat hurt and the small sob that he heard leave his mouth only made it worse. She pressed her forehead against his neck, and he cradled the back of her head with his hand.

“Where?” He asked, fingers still curling in her hair. She was holding on to him with a death-grip of her own.

“He left with Hill.”

“And the others?”

She was quiet, then pulled back to look him in the eyes. She might have been about to say something else, but she closed her mouth again, stopping to wipe under her own eyes and then his.

His heart felt like it was sinking too fast. Lost. “They don’t know,” Clint guessed. “How? He was right…Tasha, he was there. Fifteen yards at the most. He was  _right there,_ ” Clint’s voice broke off at the end.

He saw tears well up in her eyes, but she quickly wiped them away and steeled her expression, getting down to business. “No, they know. Tony saw him first, and he was here briefly while they tried to prevent more damage, before I made it back. Tony and Bruce were the only ones that got near him before he was dragged out by Hill, but by now Steve will have heard, and it’s a matter of time before Thor and Sam do, too.” She took a deep breath. He took her hand and squeezed. It felt like the only solid thing in the room. “We’ve been advised to lay low.”

He heard what she wasn’t saying, and it filled him with all the anger he’d felt when he heard Phil had gone in there alone to face a god. Worse, though, so much worse because no one was dead this time and his anger was old and bitter.

“They put us on a gag order? Fuck that.  _Fuck_ that, Nat.” He looked up at the ceiling because he didn’t want to see in her eyes whatever decision she’d made. He knew she would have made one, and had just been waiting on him to wake up to make her next move. A gag order from Fury via Hill meant not only keeping it from people like Pepper – people who fucking cared about Phil, too – but it also kept them from searching. An order like that was more than likely protocol, and clearly not without precedent.

“He’s been alive this whole…they fucking ghosted him. It was Fury’s idea, I’d bet my left foot. Hill probably had a hand in it, too, fuck knows if there's anything she  _doesn't_  know about. Shit…” Clint was half talking to himself, words coming out in ragged whispers because he knew his voice would break again if it was anything more, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep himself from sobbing, or maybe going for a full mental break.

And,  _fuck_ , his chest hurt like a bitch.

He felt it again when Natasha put her hands on his shoulders, silently urging him to look at her. “Clint.” She waited for him to make eye contact, and she was resolute when he did. “I never said I was sticking to the gag order. It wasn’t a verbal command, in any case, just implied.”

“SHIELD doesn’t even exist anymore.”

Natasha lifted a shoulder, as if to say,  _technically_.

“Fuck Fury.”

“Fuck them both.”

Clint bit down on his lip, and he was pretty sure that was blood seeping out from his split lip. Natasha dabbed it away with a tissue. He shook his head and had to close his eyes with how much that little motion hurt. “Did you…” he didn’t even know what to ask.

Natasha understood without him having to. “There wasn’t enough time for him to explain, or for anyone to question him. Aside from shouting, apparently.” Her face was pinched, but she was in control, only showing as much as she was because he was Clint, and whatever they decided to call themselves, they trusted each other. It was a good thing she’d cracked too, because there was no way he was going to be able to keep his expression neutral at that point and it would suck to be the only one unable to keep their emotions in check, again.

“He said my name,” she whispered, “and I couldn’t string two syllables together in time. I could hardly get close enough to confirm identity before he was whisked away by…”

“Fury?” Fury wasn’t in New York as far as they knew, but it was impossible to image anyone else being able to  _whisk_  Phil Coulson away from anything.

“A team. His team, from what it looked like.”

That information stung, even if it was a stupid reaction to have. Of course Phil had a new team. He’d left them behind three years ago, and he was always an Agent of SHIELD before anything else. Clearly. Though logical reasoning wasn’t changing much for Clint at the moment. “ _We_  were his team.”

She didn’t say anything to that, but he knew she felt it too. Betrayal. “I would have tailed them, but you were unstable, and Cap was still out in the open – he needed backup.” She paused, and her voice was almost too quiet to hear when she continued: “He saw my face. And I saw his.”

“Good,” Clint said. And it was good. Damn good, because they’d been Strike Team Delta before they’d been the Avengers, and there was a time when the three of them could have a full conversation without saying a word. Unless Phil had had a memory wipe in the past three years, Clint doubted he would have been able to miss whatever Natasha had been projecting. Even when her expressions had been little more than a brick wall, Phil was always able to decipher them, nearly as easily as Clint.

He felt a sick sense of satisfaction for the second that it took the realization that Phil was alive and functioning well enough to look at  _anything_  to come crashing back down on him. It was a mass of emotion he couldn’t begin to separate out, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

He was certain of one thing, though.

“We need to get to the Tower. You know Stark even better than I do: You know he’s going to hack into everything he can to find answers. I want to be there – I’m not getting any more of this shit second-hand.”

“Clint, you just underwent surgery. Multiple surgeries. And you were poisoned by that bullet, not to ignore the litany of heavy medications they’ve been pumping into you.”

“You forgot concussed,” he added, droll, out of habit.

Her eyes narrowed, and she was off the bed and checking his chart before he could stop her. “I assumed – your pupils are out of sync – but I hadn’t read the full diagnosis after the doctors said you’d be fine.”

“There!” he exclaimed, picking out the most important part of that statement. “They said I’m fine, and they’re the medical professionals. Let’s go.”

She stopped him from ripping out the IV. “They said you  _will be_. Not  _are._ ”

He stared at her, holding nothing back from his face. “If you think for one second I don’t know you’re as angry and hurt and still somehow fucking  _overjoyed_  as I am, then you must be the one with the concussion.”

“I’m not losing you to infection because you’re impatient.” The unspoken,  _too¸_ the awareness that they had already lost one of their number, hung between them. He slumped back in his bed, and cursed himself, because yes, it still hurt like a bitch. “In any case,” she continued, ignoring his glare. “They have to make sure there aren’t lingering effects from the poison. Keeping you under observation is necessary.”

“I can’t stay here.”  _While you do all the work for us._

Natasha stood with her hands other hips as they glared at each other in a silent stand-off.

Clint broke first. “Did you find anything out on you own?”

She gave him another ‘ _are you kidding’_  look, and his lips twitched in an almost-smile out of habit. “Hill wouldn’t explain anything in detail. I think she only answered base questions in the first place because of the circumstance. She said that keeping Coulson’s status on a need-to-know was the only way Fury could ensure success.”

“The success of fucking what?”

There was another pause, but this time he could see the anger in her eyes, even if her face was otherwise motionless. “The Avengers Initiative.”

Clint blinked as the pieces of a puzzle he didn’t know existed not an hour ago, slid into place. “Giving us a common goal. Those fuckers did it to  _motivate_  us,” he whispered in a shocked monotone.

“I doubt that’s the whole story,” Natasha countered.

“What does it matter what the story is? He’s not dead.” Clint couldn’t make his lips form Phil’s name. “He…He’s alive. All this time. And he just…stayed away. He radio-silenced us.  _Us_.”

Nat shook her head. “He wouldn't do it without a reason.”

He looked at her, incredulous. “He wouldn’t? Tash, it's what he  _did_ _._ ”

She was quiet, then seemed to come to a decision, putting her game face on. “Then what do you suggest we do?”

They stayed there, looking at each other, and an understanding passed between them.

“If he doesn’t try to find us, we’re gonna find him.”

“Good luck with accomplishing that from your sick bed,” she said dryly, but her eyes were bright, and not with tears this time.

Clint felt like he should smirk, but he couldn’t, his face wouldn’t let him do anything but harden. “I won’t have to. We’re going to the Tower.”

“What makes you think  _we_ are getting you out of here?”

“Because we both know if a torture chamber in Mardipoor can’t hold me, this civilian hospital doesn’t stand a chance. Besides, it’s always more fun when we break the rules together.”

\----

**PHIL**

“Do you need me to ask what that was, or should we cut to the chase?”

The exact second Melinda shut the door behind her, Phil let his forehead hit the desk. “I’m not sure. Go ahead, ask, and maybe I’ll come up with something.”

“What was that out there?”

“I’m assuming you’re asking about the motive behind my actions, and not a literal transcript of what happened.”

“You’d be correct. We walked into an ongoing op—”

“They don’t call them ops,” Phil mumbled, face still pressed into to the lacquered wood.

Melinda sighed heavily. “You don’t know that anymore. It’s been a long time since you were involved.”

He lifted his head to raise an eyebrow at her. “You think I don’t know that?”

She pursed her lips. Without saying another word, Melinda moved to sit down in one of the chairs in front of his desk, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap carefully. Too carefully. Damn. He was getting a  _Talk_. Maybe he needed one. No, scratch that, he  _definitely_  needed one if he was at the level where all he wanted to do was crawl into a dark hole and never resurface. Or run straight back to the Avenger’s Tower.

Neither of those were viable options.

“I think we walked into something we weren’t prepared for. I think you could have called it sooner – had someone switch positions with you to protect the op. And I think you didn’t do that because you wanted what happened to happen.”

Phil sat back in his chair slowly.

Melinda rolled her eyes. “Not him getting shot, obviously. But you wanted him to see you.”

“Three years. If I wanted that, wouldn’t I have tried to find more Inhumans in New York before now?” The only reason the team had been in New York today was because they’d had no other choice. He’d avoided movement in New York for as long as he could, but there were no other teams out doing what his team did. They were it.

“No,” Mel agreed. “You’re too good an agent to compromise the mission and your team on a whim.”

“And yet you’re insinuating I did.”

“You’re human, Phil.”

He wiggled the fingers on his new hand. “Only about eighty-five percent at his point.”

She leveled a look at him and he sighed.

“He’s going to be fine,” she said after a silent minute of staring.

“Did you hear that on the news?” Phil tried to joke, but he couldn’t quite get it to land right with the still-raw edge to his tone.

“We both know you wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t.”

“He’s died without me being there before.”

“As have you.”

“That’s different.”

“Why, because you used to be his handler?”

“…yes.”

“You weren’t his handler then, and you aren’t now.”

“Exactly!” Phil exclaimed, getting louder than he intended. He tried to still his breathing – when had it gotten so ragged? – but it was all he could do to drag in the breaths and not stop entirely.

“Why is this the time you choose to have a meltdown? There have been plenty of times you could have lost it over news about Barton, I can think of at least three where I was almost certain you would. One non-fatal gunshot wound is fairly low-stakes in comparison to the collapse of SHIELD brought on by his own teammates while he was MIA. Honestly, I thought you were past this by now.”

Phil laughed, the sound low and dark even to his own ears. “I realized there was no getting  _past this_  over a decade ago. Death and resurrection don’t seem to have done much to change that.”

She searched his eyes, his face, she even watched his hands before he tucked them back out of sight. Then she looked back up and he wanted to break something. Melinda looked sad. On his behalf. That was so much worse. “Because he saw you, too,” she realized, finally, but said it like it had been obvious the whole time.

Phil worked to unclench his jaw. “If I had called it earlier, like you said, he wouldn’t have been shot.”

“How many of the Avengers saw you?”

“Are we talking immediately, or after I followed them?”

Melinda stood abruptly, crossing her arms over her chest and pacing the room with heavy footfalls. Phil put his forehead back down on the desk.

“After everything we’ve done, all this team has been through, and  _this_  is how your cover is blown.  _Our_ cover. We’re talking about the individuals who blew up SHIELD, if you remember.”

And how many times had Natasha said that if anyone was going to take down SHIELD, it would be her? Said it while spitting blood through her teeth, glaring down the barrel of a gun or the line of her arm as she threw a knife. While she pulled Clint out of a burning building or pulled a suture needle through her skin in the backseat of a car Clint had “acquired”.

And she’d certainly done it. Not without help from the bone-chilling number of Hydra members that had made up so much of their organization – of their friends. But still. She’d finally done it.

And he’d been proud of her even as he’d mourned the losses.

“Would you rather they have let us destroy ourselves on our own time?” He said it knowing the answer. It was why they were doing this – all the rebuilding – in the first place. To do it the right way, for the right reasons.

She stared him down, not glaring, but firm.

“Two,” he admitted. “Before Agent Hill, Daisy, and Mack arrived to extract me. No, sorry, three. Romanoff was there.” Phil closed his eyes. He could see Natasha as if she was still just a corridor away. The look on her face that made him realize just how terrible an idea coming to the hospital had been – the pain, expertly hidden if only he hadn’t caught the exact same twitch that he had seen when Clint appeared to flat-line in Rio.

“Phil,” Melinda started, her voice suddenly much calmer than it should be after Phil confirmed three Avengers had made him. He looked back up, and she stepped up, leaning down with both hands braced n his desk to meet him eye to eye. “It’s done. We can’t change it. So what’s our next move?”

\----

**BEFORE**

Agent Coulson’s rules were so well known by the time he died that they had become something of a running joke that turned into praxis at SHIELD, the way people start out saying something ironically and then before they know it, the thing just becomes a part of their natural vocabulary.

For the year Clint spent with SHIELD after Phil’s death, he’d noticed the way agents, especially the juniors, would use the rules with a weird reverence behind them. Like that was the way they were going to honor him, since dead agents weren’t something you talked about unless you were Fury being an asshole to make a point. Clint hated it (mostly because they got the rules in the wrong order, nine times out of ten), but he supposed it was better than the alternative. If he’d heard any one of them, even the ones who knew Phil, use the rules as just a joke, he probably would have punched someone.

Phil’s Rules hadn’t just kept them alive, they’d kept Clint sane. Rule 12: Leave the party by 11:30 to keep your dignity and good opinion of your co-workers intact. Rule 17: go with scotch, unless you are Natasha, in which case there is only vodka.

Clint had lost count of how many times he’d been close to losing it, or hyperaware and unable to shake it, and Phil broke the tension with that infuriatingly calm voice of his, bring him back to the present with a stupid rule. Or in a safe-house, with Strike Team Delta, cooking dinner and offhandedly throwing out a rule, making them feel like they were people. Not an easy thing to pull off when it’s Black Widow and Hawkeye, but Phil always managed. 

When he died, the little things were ripped away.

The one thing he couldn’t get out of his head, even on the worst days, on the days he wasn’t sure he’d make it out of, or if he even wanted to make it out, was that Phil would be angry if he knew the way Clint was living. Worse, he’d be disappointed. Clint had been fighting against the feeling of letting people down his entire life, but with Phil? He would have rather disappointed everyone he’d ever known a million times over than ever disappoint Phil again.

So, Clint had begun making rules for himself. Number one: don’t do shit that would make Phil sad if he knew. This passive death wish thing he had going on? That had to stop. He knew it did. He still had Natasha. And the memory of Phil, if not the real thing.

And the darker truth he only admitted to Tash once, was that dying would be easy, and he didn’t deserve easy.

Eventually, Clint started living for himself, but it had started with those rules. It started, like it always seemed to, with Phil.

**AFTER**

Nat walked silently by his side, always in his peripheral with her shoulders back and arms swinging by her sides. He knew what she was doing – he’d done the same for her more times than he could count. They took care of each other, he and Nat. If that meant pretending one of them could walk in a straight line without any risk of collapsing when in reality that person was shuffling along at best and stumbling down the hall barely holding themselves upright in truth, then that’s what they did.

She was there, offering silent support while she helped him wheel his IV bag, and it let Clint breathe for all the time it took to walk from the car to the elevator and up to the Avenger’s private floors.

The second they stepped out into the communal area, they heard a laugh that could only be Tony – scathing and loud and meant to cut a person’s confidence to shreds. Clint tried to roll his shoulder but stopped halfway with a grunt of pain. Natasha gave him a look that told him exactly how smart she thought he was. He knew her well enough to see the hint of concern in the way her eyes slid over his chest, looking him over where he flinched.

He nodded at her, and she opened the door for him without another word.

Clint could feel the tension coming from the Situation Room – as they had started calling the conference room after the second Toaster Disaster – before he got so much as a foot over the threshold.

“What the hell do you _think_ is going on here, Hill?” Tony shouted. Tony was facing the projection of Agent Hill on the wall, leaning over the conference table with enough tension in his shoulders to snap a tree.

“Stark, stand down,” Hill ordered. Clint scoffed, _did she really think that was going to do anything but piss Tony off,_ and all six pairs of eyes turned on him and Natasha.

Clint bit down on the inside of his cheek and made himself stand straighter, taller. It wasn’t too hard with the urge to hit something still blessedly running stronger than the urge to crawl into the fetal position. “Did I miss the part where someone explains why a dead man walked into the fight today?”

It was times like this, where he knew how to make his voice the very picture of calm and level, that he was glad for SHEILD training. Glad that Phil had decided he was worth the trouble. And oh, did those memories feel like blisters as he stared down Hill through the glorified Skype call.

Steve started making his disappointed frowny face, but this time Clint didn’t give a shit. That was a feat in and of itself. “Clint, you’re supposed to be in the hospital.”

Clint ignored the twinges in his chest as he stalked over to the nearest chair and made himself comfortable, feet propped up on the table, one hand gripping the pole of his IV bag. He hoped no one looked too hard at his eyes, since he was a touch away from being absolutely stoned on narcotics. Maybe a touch more than that. “Add it to the ever-growing list of things that aren’t going as planned, Cap.”

Bruce let out a stiff sigh.

“Alright there, Bruce-y bear?” Tony asked, carefully. No one wanted to have to wrangle the Hulk in this tight a space, however many stories above ground.

Bruce rolled his eyes. “Not especially,” he deadpanned. “Agent Coulson tries to barge in and distract us from saving that asshole right over there, and then said asshole risks his recovery by showing up during our latest shouting match. Not to forget that Agent Hill and Fury continue to refuse to explain how Agent Coulson is able to walk _anywhere_. Considering that we were all there when they buried him.”

The room took a beat of silence.

Hill cleared her throat and Clint was _so_ not in the mood for her authoritative shit today. “I understand that emotions are running high-”

“I _wonder_ why?” Tony snarked. Clint almost cheered him on.

“ _Therefore_ ,” Hill continued, “I’ll save you the usual song and dance about necessary secrecy and impossible decisions made in circumstance far beyond any one person’s control. The knowledge of Agent Coulson’s status is limited to a select few outside of the room you’re in right now. It needs to stay that way.”

“You lied to us, and all we get is a lecture on the virtues of secrecy? You sneaky, conniving sons of-”

“Tony,” Cap interrupted quickly. He faced the projection again. “Agent Hill, out of line as he may be, I have to agree with Tony’s sentiment. Agent Coulson wasn’t just a distant SHEILD operative to this team. His death and…return...have serious implications.”

Tony’s eyes flicked over to Clint before he added; “Damn right. We knew you were a bunch of manipulative bastards, but this? If you think I won’t break any and all mutual understandings we may have had about hypothetical hacking and espionage, you’ve underestimated my penchant for excessive retribution.”

Clint hadn’t seen Tony this angry, this stone-faced and fearsome, since the government had tried to go after Steve and Natasha for the fall of SHIELD, or when someone went after Happy and Pepper. It was somewhere in the middle of Tony’s tirade of promises to strip every ounce of tech he could find to ruin all their lives, that Clint realized Tony wasn’t even doing it for his own sake.

He felt a weight in his throat that made it harder to swallow. He didn’t know what to do with the new realization that Tony was fighting for _him_ , that he was ripping Hill a new one on Clint’s behalf, but that’s what was happening.

“SHIELD—” Hill started, but Tony railroaded over her like she was a fired intern and hadn’t been Fury’s second in command.

“In case you missed the memo, SHIELD doesn’t _exist._ Widow and the human embodiment of patriotism took care of that,” Tony snapped.

Hill missed one beat, just a slight pause, but it was enough to raise a major red flag. Natasha spat out a curse in Russian under her breath in the same moment Clint’s felt his blood go cold.

The silence from Hill, the even tempered look on her face – a perfect mask that betrayed absolutely nothing – and Clint’s worldview shifted for the second time in five minutes, and third time that day. Whatever form SHIELD was in, it was clearly still _something_ , and he and Nat had been left in the cold. It was looking like Natasha's estimation of the people who pulled Phil away was right on the money. 

He might have had something to say about that if he wasn’t already so numb, inside and out.

“She won’t tell us anything,” Natasha said casually, a lightness that didn’t come close to matching the topic. Tony looked ready to start shouting again, and Steve had that pout ready on his lower lip – like he’d expected this to go civilly – but one flat look from Natasha and they both kept quiet. “Feel free to surprise me,” she said to Hill, “but we both know that if you could have said anything you would have done it by now. This was a strategic call to assess how pissed off we were, and to remind us not to go blabbing SHIELD secrets to the world. Again.”

Natasha flashed Hill the smile Clint loved seeing in the field, the sharp corners and hint of teeth that meant a bad day for whomever was on the receiving end.

“Rest assured,” Tony said slowly, arms crossing over his chest slowly, stance widening like he was Nat’s second in a school yard brawl, “the Avengers are thoroughly pissed off. You can tell that to Fury in whatever kinky bunker he’s hiding in right now. We don’t work for him, and he should get used to that sooner rather than later. Hope you have a difficult and stress filled day, Hill.”

Tony shut off the call right as Hill opened her mouth to respond.

There was a moment of quiet before Bruce cleared his throat. “I’m assuming that none of this was on the files you released?” He asked Natasha.

Clint watched her jaw tick before she answered stiffly, “No.”

“Those paranoid bastards,” Tony muttered. “It was never on anything I dug up, either.”

“You were still going through their records after the Chitauri invasion?” Steve asked, his frown more of a pout this time.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Well considering most of them were Hydra, and you and Widow over here took them out in a grand and public fashion, I’m really not understanding the disapproving look. At least _I_ never blew up a building.”

“Neither did I!” Steve argued.

“Can we fight over relevant things, for once?” Natasha said, glaring at them both.

“Great idea,” Tony agreed, wagging a finger at the blank screen. “Like how we’re going to find and drag Agent’s ass back here to give us the rundown of the past three years of his undead life.”

Clint’s jaw clicked. “We’re not going to do that,” he said, almost too low to hear, but the looks on their faces proved they absolutely had.

“What?” Steve said, eyes wide.

“Clint…” Bruce started gently.

“You’ve got to be fucking with me, Barton,” Tony scoffed.

“I’m not fucking with anyone.” Clint stood slowly and looked each of them in the eye. He hadn’t realized he’d even made the decision until the words were coming out of his mouth, but when they did, he knew they were the right ones. “He was here, wasn’t he?”

“For two half-baked seconds while we were trying to make sure you didn’t _die_ ,” Tony said. “Wasn't exactly a great time for a catch-up.”

“If he wanted anything to do with us, don’t you think he would have stuck around?” Clint spat out the words, too tired and hurt and filled with _feeling_ to register that he was being harsher than he needed to be. He threw out a hand toward the door. “You think we’d be sitting here, begging for god damn table scraps of information, if he gave two shits about what we deserve?”

“What, so we should just sit on our asses some more?” Tony said sarcastically, rolling his shoulders back as he crossed his arms tight over his chest.

Clint felt like deflating, crumbling in on himself, because, yes, sitting on his ass was exactly what the small, injured part of his soul wanted to do. But fuck that. “I never said we were going to sit on our asses.”

Nat was suddenly standing behind him, and he would have bet good money that she was giving Tony her _I dare you_ eyes over Clint’s shoulder.

“It’s certainly a strategy,” she said in a slow, calculating voice. He could practically hear her running through the play in her head, same as he was.

Bruce leaned over the table, braced on both forearms. His eyebrows pulled together and it looked like he was catching on, too. “Well, clearly, going the direct route has gotten us nowhere. We trusted them to tell us the truth once, and I’m not sure I’m willing to do that again. Clint and Natasha knew – know – him best. If they think going under the radar is the way to go, then I’m inclined to agree.”

Steve, ever the strategist, looked exactly like a cartoon character with a light bulb going off over his head. Then he was frowning. “I don’t know if I like going the espionage route. There’s been too much of that going around.”

Tony looked between all four of them. “When did the train leave the station on this conversation?”

Nat spoke first, not a hint of exasperation left on her face, now she was determined. “Clint wants to do this the old-fashioned way – going covert-ops instead of smashing our way in.”

Tony blinked, then was grinning wide. “I keep forgetting you’re a devious bastard, Legolas.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “I was a top SHIELD asset for a decade before you ever decided to put on your big-boy suit.”

“Second to the top,” Natasha reminded him.

“We were a team, we were at the top together.”

“Still second.”

“Would calling for a vote on this just be redundant?” Steve asked, cutting off the chatter.

“You’d be the only ‘nay’, Cappuccino,” Tony teased, smirking.

Clint counted it as a testament to Steve’s composure that Tony didn’t get socked in the face at least three times a day. Steve hardly looked annoyed, just a quick flash of a soft smile at the nickname. Huh. Clint adjusted his assessment from a testament to Steve’s composure to a compliment to the strength of his libido. He made a mental note to look into that – and by looking into it, he meant prying the gossip out of Natasha. She always knew something.

“Actually,” Steve said, blushing just a bit around his ears – adding a solid point in favor of Clint’s new theory. “I would have voted ‘yes’.

Clint whistled. “Way to go, Cap. Welcome the morally grey side, we have pins.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Given the circumstances, I think you and Bruce are right. As much as I’d rather be transparent, we won’t get answers that way. It makes me twitchy just thinking about what other things they’ve kept from us, if they could stoop to this.”

Clint almost envied him for thinking this was the worst SHIELD had been willing to do.

“Then there’s only one thing left to decide,” Tony said gravely. “Nose-goes on telling Thor!”

Everyone’s hand shot up to their noses, Steve with a triumphant “HA!” – obviously proud of himself for catching on this time – Nat with a sigh, and Bruce with a groan as he came in last.

“Fine, but if he brings out the Hulk, it’s on all of you.”

\----

**BEFORE**

Rule 2: Keep it to yourself.

That one had been a direct rip-off of Phil’s Rule 45: keep personal entanglements to yourself whenever possible. That had come up when Clint had puppy-dog stalked Bobbi for a solid two months after she officially joined SHIELD. Clint had mocked it endlessly, calling it, Rule 69: PDA is Bad and Dirty, to the point that Phil even cracked a smile (Albeit in the privacy of his own office, where it was just the two of them, but Clint always preferred it that way. It felt special like that).

Coincidentally, it was that rule Clint had mentioned the night it all boiled over – it being the tension he and Phil had spent years barreling toward. 

It was the dead of night in Monaco, in an alleyway right after they’d run for their lives from a casino they’d spent the past two weeks casing. Natasha was supposed to be heading toward the safehouse, her honeypot cover blown beyond repair. He and Phil should have been making their way there, too.

Instead, Clint was breathing heavy, leaning back against the wall, and Phil was hunched over with his hands on his knees, panting at the ground. His suit jacket had been lost to a chandelier earlier in the evening, and his previously-white shirt was splattered with bright blue paint and covered in body glitter. It was the funniest thing he’d ever goddamn seen after two weeks of watching creeps paw at Tasha and making drinks for assholes and women who thought he was nothing but pretty and stupid. Of watching Phil playing the part of the overworked banker on holiday with a penchant for blowing all of his money at one table. Two weeks of absolutely nothing happening for it to end up with Phil looking like he’d narrowly escaped an enthusiastic bachelorette party.

It was just too good, and Clint broke down laughing in full, body-racking gasps, eyes tearing up, just to laugh even harder when Phil straightened and frowned at him, and Clint saw he had glitter streaked down the side of his face and above an eyebrow.

Then Phil huffed, and Clint thought for a second that he was about to roll his eyes and walk off, but when he calmed enough to really look he saw Phil was ginning and chuckling, too. Chuckling. Another nervous laugh bubbled out of Clint’s chest, seeing Phil loose like that. _Fuck, he’s beautiful_ , Clint thought. Then Phil looked over to Clint, still grinning, and his eyes were so bright. Phil had the best eyes, they could convey so much, even when the rest of his face was impassive.

It wasn’t impassive now.

Clint was all too aware of the wall behind his back as Phil walked over and didn’t stop coming until he was inches away from Clint. He was still grinning. Clint almost cleared his throat, but it seemed incredibly stupid and the last thing Clint wanted when Phil was this close and looking at him like that was to look stupid. “Something funny?”

He smirked back at Phil. “You got a little something right here,” Clint teased, pointing at his own cheek.

Phil raised a brow and swiped his thumb across the smear of glitter on his face. Clint was about to say something snarky like the roguish flirt he was, but then Phil took that thumb and rubbed it along Clint’s cheekbone and for a second Clint was sure his brain had short circuited.

“There,” Phil said simply.

In the dark, with Phil standing close enough Clint could swear he felt the heat coming off his body, Clint felt a spike of adrenaline; not so much out of bravery as a very specific sense of ‘fuck it’, after so long spent shoving down the pull he felt every time he looked at Phil.

“Nah, you still got some over here.” This time Clint reached out and rubbed at a perfectly clear spot at the side of Phil’s mouth, dragging his thumb down to Phil's chin.

He felt the Phil’s breath on his hand and knew without a doubt that Phil Coulson did nothing without purpose. If he was standing this close, no longer grinning but looking at Clint with…with a look. _Oh, fuck._

Clint had no idea who moved first, all he knew was that one moment he was watching Phil looking at him with lust in his eyes, and the next he had Phil’s hot, demanding mouth on his. Clint wasted no time, grabbing Phil by the back of the neck and pulling him in closer, his other hand dropping to Phil’s waist like he’d imagined doing so often. This time it was real, though. This time Phil’s hands were pulling on his hips, too, pulling him tight against Phil’s body while pressing him back against the wall at the same time.

Clint opened his mouth and ran his tong along Phil’s bottom lip. He felt Phil tense and for a second he could only think that he fucked something up so he tensed, too, ready to slip away, but thank god, he was wrong. Phil tensed, and then dove in. There was one moment where they were kissing, and Clint was taking the lead, and then it was all Phil.  _PhilPhilPhil_.

Phil who was running a hand up Clint’s back and pulling up his shirt, pressing his hips into Clint’s so they could both feel the undeniable interest going on down there, and sliding his tongue into Clint’s mouth, moving his tongue and lips constantly, driving every inch of Clint wild.

Clint felt Phil’s fingers pressing into the sweaty skin of his back and he moaned into Phil’s mouth. He hadn’t meant to, but Phil seemed to appreciate it anyway, driving a knee between Clint’s legs and offering the beautiful, wonderful, hot-as-fuck friction Clint’s dick was begging for.

When they broke apart for breath, that fear that he’d fucked up and Phil had changed his mind about wanting to make out with his smart-mouthed field specialist in a dirty alleyway in the middle of the night.

So Clint’s dumb mouth did the thing. “Rule 69, sir,” he teased, his voice coming out ragged and hungrier than he anticipated. But, damn. Phil with his pupils blown wide and his lips kissed-red, open and breathing hard…he couldn’t really blame himself.

Phil’s knee pressed higher and that one fucking eyebrow twitched up and Clint didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at half his fantasies playing out in real life. Then Phil's knee dropped, just slightly. “You can always tell me to stop.”

The thing was, Clint knew Phil pretty well. Really well, he liked to think. And while he sounded smug, while it sounded like a tease, Clint knew the statement for what it was: an out. Phil had always been there to offer another option, no matter the situation. It was a part of why Clint loved working with Strike Team Delta so much, and why he trusted Phil more than any other agent. Part of why the initial attraction Clint had for the hot, competent bad-ass in a suit had turned into something so increasingly complicated.

He knew Phil well enough to know that he could do leagues better than ex-mercenary, currently-working-on-a-GED, Clint Barton. Meaning, Clint knew this wasn’t a _thing_. It was fun. Hot. Not a thing that lasted. Was it worth it to have this now and take the pain later?

Clint ran his hand up Phil’s side, up to his shoulder blade, dragging his nails as he went and watching the calculating look in Phil’s eyes shift into blatant, unrepentant want. And god, it felt so good to be wanted by Phil.

Phil met him halfway when Clint moved in to kiss him again, and without a doubt in his mind, Clint knew it would all be worth it, whatever came later. And he hadn’t once doubted that decision, until now.

\----

**AFTER**

Three things were immediately _off_ the moment Clint walked into the bedroom of his apartment in the Tower. First, there was a mountain of pillows that nearly made it halfway down the bed that had _not_ been there the last time Clint slept in it. Second, there were obnoxious “Get Well Soon” and “You’re a Champ!” balloons surrounding a vase of arrows with purple ribbons attached to the ends made to look like flowers on his nightstand. Third, there was a crisp piece of paper folded on the corner of the bed.

Somehow it was the paper that stood out the most. Maybe because it was computer-paper plain and the rest of the stuff was an assault on his retinas. But if that was all it was, his stomach wouldn’t have bottomed out at the sight of it.

He knew what it was before he picked it up. How could he not?

Tony hated paper. Steve didn’t write letters as much as he sketched, and this didn’t look like a sheet out of his sketchbook. Sam wasn’t even there, not that Clint knew the guy well outside of battle and a few beers with the team. Thor was out of the suspect list, too – because _Thor_ – and get-well letters weren’t really Bruce’s style. If he wanted to show support, Bruce would have made a cup of tea and made it a point to sit next to Clint and make conversation, or some other quiet gesture that Clint wouldn’t know what to do with.

He ruled out the possibility of it being from any SI employees entirely, since he didn’t know even one of them, and no one seemed too interested in Hawkeye outside of a fundraiser setting. It couldn’t be SHIELD either, since they hadn’t thought to write to him after they decided _not_ to call it quits after all.

So, by process of elimination, Clint knew exactly what that paper was.

But even if he didn’t know his team, even if he couldn’t rule out a single one of them, Clint figured he’d still know. It was textbook Coulson.

It had been a tradition, once upon a time – way back when they would leave little post-it notes and chicken scratch on slips of paper for each other after a solo mission, or after any significant amount of time spent away from each other, really. Way back when Clint’s world was narrowed down to two people and a rotating door of mission objectives.

Without thinking, he was suddenly standing beside the bed and the paper was in his hands. A smaller, ripped piece of the same stuff fell back on the bed and he left it. There was handwriting on the full-sized sheet, but Clint didn’t couldn’t see it right away, his vision gone unfocused and hazy for the second it took to pull himself together.

> _I’m sorry._
> 
> _Those words will never be adequate or come close to what you deserve to hear after three years of silence, but they’re what you are owed. I am sorry for so many things, including the injuries you sustained because of my mistake. ~~You weren’t supposed to~~ That should never have been the way you found out, any of you, but especially you and Natasha. _
> 
> _I am sure you don’t want to hear the reasoning we had for the decision to keep you in the dark. I wouldn’t blame you. Still, there are details that I can’t write down on paper, much less tell you over the phone – reasons I didn’t fully understand until recently, and even then, there are things we just have to go with. None of it will ever be an excuse, but it is an explanation._
> 
> _It is entirely up to you whether you want to hear it or not. If you decide ~~you don’t want~~ not, then I will respect your decision. No questions asked._
> 
> _I can’t stay nearby to wait for you to wake. I’m sorry for that, too. Know that I wouldn’t be doing this in a letter if I had the option._

No signature.

That explained the unrecognizable name and number on the ripped piece of paper – a code name and burner phone.

Clint didn’t know how long he stared at the letter in his hands. The even, concise scrawl was familiar in a way that made his chest contract. If he hadn’t been sure before, if he’d thought somewhere in the back of his mind that maybe some asshole had the tech or the magic to make themselves look exactly like Phil Coulson, then that was out the window, now. This was Phil. From the vaguely formal tone to his rushed but still infuriatingly neat handwriting was right here in front of him as if it never left, as if Clint had been looking at that penmanship every day for three years, as if he’d never forgotten that annoying way Phil made his a’s computer-font perfect every time.

Maybe Clint hadn’t forgotten it, not really. He just hadn’t had a reason to think about it because Phil had been dead.

Clint crumpled the paper and chucked it across the room where it tapped the wall and slid to the floor with the most unsatisfying sound. He threw pillow after pillow at the note as hard as he could – _who had put so many god damn pillows on his bed?_ – until he was yelling at the wall, at nothing and everything, at the top of his lungs, and he slunk to the floor, his back against the bed.

He let his head fall into his hands, and it _hurt._ Physically, emotionally – it all hurt like a son of a bitch.

He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry until he started making choked up laughing sounds from his throat that scratched on the way up, and his chest protested because apparently, he couldn’t even throw a damn pillow and scream without upsetting the stitches and yet-to-heal wound in his chest.

He almost managed to get a grip until he realized he wasn’t all that mad about the physical pain of it after all, because at least the injury meant that Phil was alive. Then the laugh-sobs started again, and they didn’t stop, not even when Natasha came in and sat beside him, holding his hand and lacing their fingers together, or when his chest wound started bleeding through his shirt in little spots.

“Did the pillows give you the stink eye?” she asked after a while.

He sighed, trying to pretend it was more than the pitiful shake it was. “Was it you who decided I needed ten pillows on one bed?”

She shrugged, shifting closer against his side with the movement, offering silent support. He felt like an asshole: she’d lost Phil and gotten him back in the same back-handed way that he had, yet here he was, making it all about him.

If he held her hand a little tighter, neither of them said anything about it.

“I think that was Tony’s doing,” she said simply. “No one ever taught him how to express worry and relief for a friend like a normal person.”

“To be fair, I don’t think I’d lump us in with the normal people, either.”

“We fake it better.”

“Point,” he mumbled, not pausing long before he added, “There was a note on my bed.”

Natasha tensed. She didn’t have to ask who it was from, he knew from the look on her face that she could read the answer all over him. “Hence the pillow assault?”

He inclined his head toward the pile. “It’s under there somewhere.”

She got up to find it with all her usual grace and efficiency and sat back down next to him as she read. He waited, watching for when she reached her own name, because the corners of her eyes pinched for a millisecond before smoothing out again. “That bastard,” she said softly, eyes skimming back over the words again and again. Her tone was less angry than the petty part of Clint wanted it to be. If she got mad, it would be nothing at all for him to get mad too and being mad sounded a hell of a lot better than whatever the hell this was.

“Was there one in yours?” he asked.

“I haven’t been there, yet. I hadn’t planned to make sure you weren’t overextending yourself for another half hour, but JARVIS alerted me to an unusual spike in your vitals.”

“Go check,” Clint whispered. She stayed as still as stone, not taking her eyes off the note. She was afraid. Clint shifted around slowly to face her directly, and gently took the paper from her hands. He held both of them between his own. “Natasha.”

She looked up at him, and it was all right there. A mix of emotions that mirrored the way he was feeling, though he knew she pulled it off better. He also knew without asking that she was afraid to go in her room and find nothing, and equally afraid to find a letter of her own.

After a few moments of settling herself, she nodded and stood without a word.

The second she left the room, Clint felt that heavy loneliness settle back down on him, which was stupid because he’d been the one to send her out.

When she came back in, she held out an uncrumpled version of the same kind of paper.

> _You won’t trust an apology written out on paper, and you might not even trust one in person, but I am sorry, Natasha. For so many things._
> 
> _This number is good any time of day or night. If you decide you want an explanation, I will give you what I know. That’s your choice, always, not an order. I will never hold your decision against you, whatever you choose to do._

There was a copy of a different name and the same number in her other hand.

“If I ever get one of these from you, I will not hesitate to shoot you on sight,” she told Clint, deadpan.

“I’d probably hesitate to shoot you if you did it, but I’d also pull out my best puppy-dog eyes and then whine a fuck-ton.”

Natasha whacked his arm and took back her note. “ _I wouldn’t leave a note like this, Natasha_. That’s what you were supposed to say.” She hit him again on the other arm for good measure, and strode over to hop up on his dresser while Clint flopped down on his bed.  “So,” she started, tone lighter than the situation asked for.

“I don’t know,” he answered. He knew what she was asking what their game plan was. “We don’t have a play for this. Who the fuck would have a play for this?”

The look she gave him seemed to echo his own thoughts. _Coulson would_.

“How would you do it if it were a regular mission?” she asked.

Clint didn’t have to hesitate to answer that one. Damn her. “Run the name and number though the systems. Sometimes Coulson used road signs or names on buildings to come up with his aliases, or maybe they’re ones he had written up for an op recently enough for a paper trail to still be worth something. I’d try to look for clues in the news – things he and his new team might have been involved with and covered up.” The words _new_ _team_ felt bitter enough to make Clint want to spit. He didn’t though, because Nat hated when he did that, and he didn’t feel like earning another whap.

“Then we’ll start there.”

Clint sat back up, cursing under his breath with the pain. “And then what, Tasha? Tell me what I ought to do, because I’m running blind, here.”

She looked off in the direction of his door before she answered with a question: “Do you want to see him?”

Clint closed his eyes. No was his immediate reaction. After a letter like that? He wanted to just say, _fuck Coulson_ , and be done with it. After three god damned years? Coulson could go fuck himself. But still… _three years_ …

“Yes,” he admitted, hating himself just a little bit more.

Natasha sighed though her nose. “Then why is this so hard?”

She wasn’t just asking about why it was hard for him. He remembered telling her once, in the very early days – so early he was only Agent Barton to her – that pain was a side effect of loving. That the pain would come whether or not you ever wanted to love in the first place. Now, he was eating his words and he realized how much of a jackass he had sounded.

Clint shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m pissed, so for a moment I think I don’t want to see him, and then I think about _never_ seeing him and it makes me want to hurl. So, I guess that means I do want to see him.” He scoffed. “I _know_ I do, who the fuck am I kidding, right? But…”

Because she was Natasha, she understood him, again, without either of them having to put the truth into words. God, he loved her. Somehow that made it all hurt worse.

“If you run,” she said, “think about giving me a head’s up.”

He stilled. “I never said I was gonna run.” Never mind that was his M.O., and that the little voice in the back of his head had been begging him to _go – get out – get far –_ from the very moment they’d left the hospital.

“You have that look.”

Clint didn’t know what to say, so he let what was left of his brain-to-mouth filter go to hell. “If I ran, we know there’s only one place I’d be headed.”

Natasha was quiet, studying him, searching for a tell or maybe something else, Clint didn’t know. She must have found it, though, because she let out a long sigh. “I’d hoped you would have been able to move on. I thought you had or were at least getting close.”

Clint laughed, though none of it was funny. She always cut straight to the issue Clint would rather skirt. “There’s no getting over this, Nat,” he admitted. No getting over _him_ , Clint really meant, but he didn’t need to say that.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“What, like back in the old days?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Since Ecuador.”

It took Clint a moment to recall the mission she was talking about, but even then, he couldn’t think of anything special about it. It had been just over a decade since Ecuador. Eleven years and counting.

She rolled her eyes, but it came across more endeared than exasperated. She was letting that show a lot more often these days, but maybe this time it had something to do with him bleeding through his stitches and their current, combined emotional instability.

“You were looking at him like he was the only person on the planet when he walked into that warehouse to drag us out of there. Then you kept doing it, any moment we weren’t in immediate danger and you thought no one was watching, I’d catch you in the act. And then you jumped in front of a bullet for him.”

Clint shifted awkwardly. “I’ve taken plenty of bullets for you, too. Real _and_ metaphorical.”

She let him sit in silence for a long minute with the stupidity of that statement, as if trying to emphasize how much that _wasn’t_ the point.

“It would have scratched him, at worst,” Natasha deadpanned. “You knew that, and yet you had a look of utter horror in your eyes. The only other times I saw that look on your face after that was when Phil was bleeding out, or tortured.”

“Yeah, well,” Clint huffed. “I got smarter about hiding my shit when you were around, after Ecuador. You see too much, Romanoff.”

She smirked. “You’re an easy read, Barton.”

“Feel free to take a short leap off a tall cliff.”

“I’d survive it.”

He stuck out his tongue in response, because, yeah. She probably would.

She smiled, and he found himself smiling back, until her smile fell, and she looked impossibly sad for a moment before she managed to wipe the expression clear. Natasha dropped down from the dresser and walked over to squeeze Clint’s shoulder.

“The doctor said no range training for at least two weeks,” she reminded him.

Clint rolled his eyes. “She just meant no heavy draws.”

“I’m certain she did not.”

“I’m sorry, do you have a PhD in medicine?”

“Closer to one than you are.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “I only failed the SHIELD field test one time.”

“Because you used the medical equipment to take down the opposing team instead of securing the injured operative,” she countered.

“Actually, that was you, and you still passed.”

She laughed under her breath and let herself be pulled down beside him again when he tugged her sleeve. He hated feeling needy, but fuck it. With the amount of pain-sharing they’d been doing since Clint woke up, he figured she’d appreciate the physical contact, too. That _was_ the initial reasoning behind their brief sexual relationship, after all – familiar, reassuring contact.

That, or Clint was just good at making up excuses. Hence: fuck it.

They sat together in comfortable silence for a while before he asked; “So, when were you going to tell me Steve was that far gone for Tony?”

She looked at him with a heavy eyebrow raise. “I figured it was obvious. Are you telling me you’re just now noticing his lonely puppy routine?”

“No!” Yes. “But even if I was, it’d be because Steve’s so _Steve_ , and I’ve been too busy ripping Tony to shreds over his blatant infatuation with the guy.” Not that Clint was so sure it could be called infatuation anymore, given it’d been just over a year since Clint picked up on Tony’s _Steve_ patterns, and they had only gotten stronger and more numerous in the interim.

“You know I won’t count it against you if you go alone,” Natasha said, taking the conversation in an abrupt 180. He should have been prepared for that – it wasn’t like her to let something like this go so easily. “You beat yourself up enough for the both of us. Unless you do something extremely stupid, in which case, what’s fair is fair.”

He tried and failed to swallow past the lump in his throat. “What’s the range on extreme stupidity? Jumping mid-flight without a ‘shute only counts as moderately dumb?”

She took his chin in her hand, forcing him to look her in the eyes. He wanted to quip, to blurt out something idiotic to shatter the persistent tension, but he couldn’t make his mouth move right when she was looking at him like that – like she cared about him and wanted him to know it. They knew each other too well for him to mistake that look for anything else.

“Don’t decide tonight. You’re emotionally compromised.”

“Jeez, Nat. Tell it to me straight, why don’t you.”

She didn’t laugh. Fair enough, it really wasn’t funny. “Ice cream in fifteen. Make yourself presentable,” she told him, patting his cheek and standing up like it was just another day and Clint was having a melodramatic episode.

The Avengers had accumulated many traditions since deciding they could be in the same room without wanting to kill each other, after all. It started with the Schwarma and nose-dived into ridiculousness from there.

One of those little traditions was ice cream after near-death experiences that resulted in surgery. There was a totally different one for other near-death circumstances, but that was neither here nor there.

It started when Tony got unceremoniously ejected from his suit during a battle against a magic wielding nut-job whose specialty just so happened to be tech. Clint didn’t think he’d ever forget the look on Tony’s face when the whole team showed up in his hospital room carting tubs of ice cream just because Tony couldn’t stomach anything else. Nor the nurse’s face when Steve unleashed his full golly-gee eyes on her to get her to let them in with all that contraband. That had been one of Clint’s many reminders that Steve could be kind of an asshole when he wanted to be. So, a great day to remember all around.

He just got his throat to work past the lump lodged in its center right as she opened the door to leave. “If Thor eats all the birthday cake flavor again, I’m tendering my resignation.”

The middle finger he got for that comment made him feel oddly more at ease.

\----

**BEFORE**

It had been nearly a month between the first time Clint and Phil got off together in an alleyway and the disaster that was the op in Ecuador. By the time they made it to the safe house and Natasha had gone out to secure the area then meet with their contacts to get them the hell out of South America, Clint was alternating between wanting to pass out, needing to check the sight-lines, and needing to keep Phil in his peripheral at all times.

That last one was made more difficult with Phil’s insistence that Clint sit down and let him redress his wound.

“I’m fine, Coulson, the wrap is holding fine,” Clint snapped without meaning to.

Phil stood with his arms crossed tightly over his chest. “Really. Tell that to me again when you bleed through those in the next half hour and you have Natasha to deal with at the shift change.”

Clint winced. She’d been on edge since the warehouse, not that he could blame her. Seeing him bleed through his bandages – again – would only make her worry more. Not that she would ever admit that chewing him out was her way of worrying.

He knew he wasn’t going to win. “Fine, just get it over with.”

Phil chuckled as he gathered the supplies from his go-bag and sat beside Clint on the bed, motioning for him to show Clint his back. It was damn lucky Clint was so good at falling, otherwise the debris could have hit something much worse and less protected.

“That’s not the kind of enthusiasm I usually get,” Phil said, teasing.

Clint laughed then cursed at the pain it caused. “I bet people don’t usually bleed all over you, either.”

“It’s been known to happen on occasion.”

“Kinky, Coulson.”

He yelped as Phil prodded a sensitive spot in retaliation. “Bold move to test the person with unfettered access to your injury.”

“Eh, you’ve had access to worse ones and my mouthing off hasn’t broken you yet.”

“I don’t know if that speak more to faith or stubbornness.”

“Little of column A, little of column B.”

He felt Phil’s breathy chuckle on his neck, and only just managed to keep from shivering, his fists clenched in the sheets. Phil noticed, because of course he would. Phil’s palm flattened against Clint’s back beside the wound. “It hurts worse than you’re letting on, doesn’t it? I’m not seeing obvious signs of infection or poison, but we don’t have the necessary equipment to do a field test here.”

“Stop planning a tactical retreat in your head, it isn’t that bad.” _It’s just that the feeling of your breath on my neck makes my head spin. You know, in a professional way, not a team-compromising one._ Not that Clint’s feelings had ever been a problem in the field. He had no problem letting the world drop away to focus on the objective and getting his people in and out safe, but when he and Phil were alone, his body fell into a reenactment of being sixteen with his first crush.

“Oh, really? Unclench your fists and I might start believing you.”

Clint rolled his eyes and obeyed, turning them in the air by his head for proof. He told himself it was better that Phil was this oblivious, and it _was_ , but that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating. “Happy?”

“I’ll be happy when we get you to medical.”

“Life or death this is not, sir.”

“It isn’t until it is. Now keep still.”

Clint grumbled but otherwise let Phil prod away at him and secure the wound the way he wanted. “How long do you think Fury’s going to go at me this time?” Clint joked dryly, attempting to break the tension.

Phil’s hands stilled again, and then tapped Clint’s back to let him know he was done. “For the warehouse? He won’t. Not if I have any say in the matter.”

Clint turned so Phil could get the full force of his skepticism. “I blew up a building.”

“And why did you do that?” Phil said in a tone that could have fooled anyone into thinking this was a casual debrief between handler and asset. Clint usually liked to think he knew better.

Clint had blown it up to give Phil and Natasha more time to pull the hostages, and to keep the enemy’s eyes off the little girl he’d strapped to his chest. They hadn’t known AIM had taken a child. There was a lot they hadn’t known about this op, as it turned out.

He knew the protocol for hostages of any age in an active situation was not to strap them to your chest and blow up the building SHEILD wanted to examine piece by piece to better understand and possibly recreate whatever fucked-up shit AIM had been doing with _children_ …but one look at that little girl who’d been too scared to speak, and Clint hadn’t needed time to think.

Fury wasn’t going to like that answer, and most of the higher-ups at SHIELD certainly wouldn’t appreciate the damage he’d done to their prize, but he hadn’t been how Phil would react. He still wasn’t sure what to expect, since they hadn’t had a moment to breathe until this moment, right here.

But none of that was making the words stick in Clint’s throat, nor was it the reason for the injury Phil was casually fretting over. Clint was also guessing that blowing up the building wasn’t the cause for the tight press to Phil’s lips. That would be too uncomplicated and nothing in Clint’s life had ever been uncomplicated.

No, that came later, when Clint and Natasha had gone to the second warehouse, checking for more children. They’d been swarmed. Trapped. It was the Black Widow and Hawkeye, no one was going to be sent in after them, and that was fair. Clint _had_ just destroyed a building full of evidence, and they were some of the most capable agents SHIELD had. But what SHIELD didn’t know was that they were screwed, exhausted, and long since out of bullets.

Then, like an idiot or a saving grace, Phil had come for them.

Come, and walked straight into the line of fire. Clint had felt his whole world narrow down to the barrel of the gun pointed at Phil. The only thing that went through his mind was the knowledge that he couldn’t allow it to happen. Phil couldn’t get shot saving their asses. Saving _Clint’s_ ass.

So, he’d thrown himself forward, just barely managing to shove Phil out of the way, catching the bullet across his back. He’d ditched his protective gear hours ago, no there was nothing but a tank-top to stop the gash that now ran shoulder to shoulder. He’d lost a handful of seconds when his vision blurred from the pain, so he couldn’t say what anyone’s immediate reaction had been, but he’d caught a hard stare from Natasha in the aftermath, and the tightness to Phil’s jaw when he spoke with the SHIELD cleaning crew.

And now, Clint figured, he was about to get a talking to. Better to attack head on, right? “It was a calculated risk.”

“After the all the times I’ve heard that from you, I’d have thought you’d find a better lie.”

Clint shrugged. “I’m not going to apologize for it.”

“It was reckless.”

“You were fresh, way more than Nat and I, and you had all the ammo. Logistically, it was better that I take the hit.”

“Is that why you did it?”

No. Not even close. “Coulson—”

“Clint.”

 _Oh, crap._ The first name. Clint’s mouth shut right up at that, which was probably Phil’s intent, but he couldn’t help it. Phil just kept staring. It felt like the world’s biggest challenge to stop himself from reaching out, but lucky for Clint, he’d gotten good at holding himself back from Phil by now.

And it was like a dam breaking, when Phil moved forward, closing the distance. There was nothing Clint could do to stop it after that, even if he’d wanted to. Phil kissed him with a hunger that only drove Clint’s need higher. With the adrenaline and sheer volume of feeling going on inside of Clint, he might not have felt it if Phil pulled the raw skin at his back, but it was Phil, and Phil was always too careful to make a mistake like that. It drove Clint crazy – Craz _ier_ – Just like the way Phil’s hands on his thighs made him crazy, or the way Phil’s body inched closer when Clint’s hands grabbed at his shirt.

He hadn’t lost Phil that night. They were safe. Together. But the moment he’d seen that gun, he’d imagined it going another way. He couldn’t take that. He wouldn’t. And he’d damn sure never apologize for acting in the moment, even if it ended up hurting them both. As far as Clint was concerned, the hurt would always be better than nothing.  

\----

**AFTER**

Clint had long since stopped wondering what he used to tell himself to keep from thinking about Phil. To stop remembering the feeling of Phil’s subtly muscular shoulder pressed up against his side, or how, after sparing or fighting for their lives, Phil’s skin would shine with sweat and he would look so _not_ -Agent Coulson that it was a shock to Clint’s system – and libido. He could remember moments where he needed to force his mind out of a very particular gutter, but not the exact words that had done the trick.

He remembered sensations, like what he felt when he saw Phil standing in the rain, in his full suit and tie, with his shoulders slumped. He remembered that he hugged Phil in the rain that night, but he didn’t, or couldn’t, remember how it felt or what he’d been thinking. He remembered putting the side of his face against Phil’s head – his cheek to Phil’s hair – and the action of inhaling the scent of him, but not what Phil smelled like. He remembered it was all he could do to keep himself from kissing Phil, from holding him closer in a way that couldn’t be brushed aside as merely comforting a friend, but not what internal words of wisdom had stopped him from screwing himself out of one of the best relationships he’d ever had by revealing too much.

He had stopped trying to remember those words too long ago for there to be any hope of getting them back. Now, it’s all he can do just to remember what those shoulders felt like under his hands, how Phil’s skin looked slicked with sweat, or how Phil’s hair smelt in the rain.

When he’d been younger, Clint had thought he’d never forget things like how his mother sounded on the rare times he heard her singing in the kitchen. He’d lost that sound decades ago.

He knew what loss did to memories over time, and yet, it still surprised him when he couldn’t immediately conjure up the feelings of _Phil_ he had once treasured. And for the past three years, he hadn’t had a reason to stop thinking about Phil, not when he was too busy trying desperately to hold on to the memories he had left.

Of course, all of that was for shit, because Phil wasn’t dead.

_Fuck gods, man._

“Not that I’d need an excuse, but why are we fucking them this time?” Tony asked lightly.

Clint bit back a groan. “Was that out loud?”

“Yup. Want to use the Residual Effects of Heavy Narcotics excuse?”

“Please.”

Tony saluted him, screwdriver in hand, then he paused and looked at the tool like he wasn’t sure how it got there. Clint sniggered, if only to get the attention away from himself. Tony flipped him the bird.

“Late night?” Clint teased.

Tony, for his part, never suppressed any groans. Instead, he moaned theatrically and slumped over the counter where the coffee maker was suspiciously still full and steaming. That was interesting. No one else but Tony drank coffee this late on a regular basis, and Clint knew for damn sure Tony hadn’t made it himself. Maybe Steve was having a late night, too…

“What can I say?” Tony groused sarcastically. “When the man whose sacrifice inspired my sacrifice – and subsequently changed the course of my entire life and current mental state – turns out to have been alive the whole time and keeping us in the dark about it, I get the engineering itch.”

If anyone asked, Clint would use that narcotics excuse for why the hell he let Tony see him wince at that reference to Phil.

Tony was suddenly wide awake and looking sympathetic. “Shit. Sorry, Barton.”

“Sorry for what, expressing frustration?” Clint snorted. He could almost convince himself it was genuine. “I’m pretty sure that’s what healthy, functioning people are supposed to do.”

“Even more reason to keep my fat trap shut,” Tony quipped, tossing Clint a protein bar with a wink.

Clint raised an eyebrow. “When I said Cap was rubbing off on you, I didn’t think I meant it figuratively.”

Tony gaped for a split second, the way he always did when he was overtired, and Cap was mentioned in any way relating to sex. “I’ll have you know the virtues of nutrition are knowledge I carry with me always. Not just because of Steve. Thank you.”

Clint hummed around a bite of the bar. “And is that why you ordered fifteen retail-sized boxes of his favorite brand of protein bars in his two favorite flavors?”

“He likes to alternate between the – no, wait – I didn’t do that. It was JARVIS. You can’t pin that shit on me, Barton! It’s my AI, I’m not responsible for his every action. They don’t send the mothers of serial killers to jail, do they?”

Clint raised a brow. “One, you just compared yourself to the mother of a serial killer. That’s horrifyingly telling, Stark. Two, I’m pretty sure they _would_ send the mothers to jail, if the mothers specifically programed said sons to follow their every order and then had those sons buy fifteen boxes of protein bars for the man they’d like to wine, dine, and dry-hump against a wall.”

Tony slurped the coffee loudly. “I plead the fifth.”

“Which keeps people from having to incriminate themselves, thereby incriminating yourself,” Clint said sweetly, batting his lashes and ducking just in time to not get hit in the face by another protein bar. 

“Fucking super spies _,_ ” Tony muttered under his breath.

Clint laughed, a real one that surprised him just a little bit. He looked back up at Tony, who, yes, was blushing, but also looking way too smug for his own good. Then it hit him. “You’re letting me fuck with you on purpose.” Damn, he was really off his game if Stark was able to get one by him like that.

“In lieu of those gods, naturally. The only one I know of in the near vicinity is Thor, and I’m sure Jane wouldn’t appreciate you boinking her boyfriend.” He grinned one of those bright and shining trademark Stark grins that really did look genuine, even up close, right until you got to know the real Tony. Clint also realized in that moment that he was one of the people that did know the real Tony.

So, he knew Tony, Tony fought on his behalf, and Tony knew the difference between when Clint needed an out and when he needed a laugh. If Clint hadn’t gone completely insane, he might have said that meant he and Stark were genuinely good friends. When had he missed that happening?

He blinked, searched his brain for a quip, and came up blank. “I thought I was doing a better job of keeping my shit to myself.” _Aww, mouth, no._ He hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He hoped this wasn’t becoming a habit.

Tony shrugged, a picturesque version of casual. “Not so much.” He set his cup down on the table and Clint’s eyes latched onto it. “I’m feeling like an Irish coffee. Wanna join me?” When Clint didn’t say anything, he amended that to; “Maybe straight Scotch, tonight.”

Clint slumped back in the chair and ran his hands over his face. If Tony Stark was this good picking up his social cues, then Clint clearly needed to go back to the Academy for lessons in espionage. The only thing worse would have been Thor trying to comfort him.

“No,” he mumbled though his hands.

“You sure?” Tony had his Serious and Concerned voice on.

“If I drink, I’ll end up calling him.”

The surprise was there and gone on Tony’s face, quickly covered by the coffee mug and Tony walking around to perch himself on the table across from Clint. “So, you found his number? Agent must be losing his touch.”

Clint huffed out a harsh, unkind laugh. “More like he left it in a fucked-up, Dear John style letter on my bed before he flew the coup.”

Tony, wisely, didn’t crack a shitty joke. “Nat know about it?”

Clint gave him a flat look worthy of Natasha, suddenly too tired to dish out the sheer amount of sarcasm necessary for a question on that level of stupid.

“Point taken. Suppose I should have asked how far she’s traced it.”

Clint sighed, but still felt pressure of a heavy weight in his chest that had nothing to do with his healing wounds. “It’s a Nokia burner cell purchased in Albuquerque one week ago, under an alias. Same name he left under the number on the note. The name was a dead end of perfectly filed paper trails that tell us nothing.”

“Albuquerque, huh?” Tony mused.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just remember something about a power plant being leveled last week around there.”

He had his thinking face on, Clint could tell. “What are you thinking, Tones?”

“I’m thinking that I could maybe whip something up for JARVIS to keep an eye out for instances like that, trace out a pattern, maybe get a head start on tracking where they’ve been to see if we can’t predict where they’ll go next.”

“You want to go after their team?” It shouldn’t have surprised him, but Clint had all but forgotten that Tony had known Phil, too. Even if Tony didn’t admit it, Clint should have known Phil’s apparent resurrection would be messing with him, or Tony wouldn’t be satisfied with the covert info-gathering routine for long.

“Uh, fuck yes,” Tony affirmed. “If they were hiding him, what the hell else have they been up to that we don’t know about? We’re the Avengers, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, world defenders extraordinaire, yada, yada, yada. I think we ought to know about the shit SHIELD’s leftovers are up to.”

Clint stared at the half-eaten protein bar. “Okay. I’ll send you what we have so far, maybe that can help.” He looked up int time to see Tony’s grin.

“You got it.”

They were quiet for a moment, and Clint was hit by how weird it was to have something vaguely resembling a heart-to-heart with Tony without so much as a hint of alcohol in sight.

“You can’t shoot with your real bow since you went and got yourself shot,” Tony started, out of the blue, “So, how do you feel about going for the next best thing?”

As long as that thing didn’t involve more talking about feelings he didn’t know what to do with and thinly veiled concern, Clint was feeling pretty open. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone right then. This team was making him soft.

“Yeah, sure, whatever.”

Or maybe they already _had_ made him soft.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony dove straight into mother-hen mode, waking everyone up and having breakfast catered from Clint’s favorite 24-hour diner, but frankly, the week had been a brand-new hell and a plate loaded with grease and carbs sounded awesome. And as it turned out, Tony’s version of the _next best thing_ was to drag everyone out into the common floor to play Wii Sports and watch movies. He had a tendency to go from debauchery to childhood innocence with little middle ground in sight.

“Am I late to the slumber party?” Clint asked, deciding last minute that vaulting over the side of the couch would be the opposite of fun for his chest, and instead walking the boring way around to lever himself down into in the free spot next to Bruce. Clint chose to sit back and let Tony do whatever made him happy, and he didn’t even roll his eyes at the reassuring smiles Bruce kept sending his way. It was five in the morning, and yet the whole team was gathered around for no other reason than it had been a really shitty week.

“Don’t give Tony ideas,” Bruce said with mock severity. “We aren’t building another pillow skyscraper.”

“That was a masterpiece and you know it. It’s not my fault Barton has a kink for jumping from tall heights,” Tony griped.

Clint was smirking, but Steve rolled his eyes and countered, “Tony, you bet him he couldn’t do it. You know what happens with bets around here.”

“It’s also not my fault that he’s easy to bait,” Tony added, gesturing distractedly with one hand, and typing something out with the other.

Thunder roared outside, cutting off Steve’s rebuttal. A crack of lightning flashed from the side of the building near Tony’s landing pad.

“I’ll go get more drinks,” Bruce said quickly, jumping up just in time to bump into Natasha.

“Beat you to it, Doctor. Here.” She handed him a mug of tea, grinning.

“How thoughtful,” Bruce said, deadpan.

“Thor Odinson has arrived, Mr. Stark,” JARVIS chimed overhead.

“Yes, thank you, Captain Obvious,” Tony snarked.

“Friends!” Thor bellowed, holding out his hands wide as the glass doors opened for him.

“Big guy!” Clint bellowed back, unable to keep the smile off his face. It was near impossible to frown when Thor was smiling at you. That, and he was still riding the high of beating Steve at Wii bowling.

“That sure was fast,” Steve said, putting down the controller to formally shake Thor’s hand like he hadn’t seen Thor’s bare ass multiple times in varying circumstances, once involving real unicorns.

Thor batted the hand away and hugged Steve within an inch of his life. “Of course! I would have come immediately, but my lady Jane was on the verge of achieving orgasm when Banner called.” The look on Bruce’s face suddenly made complete sense, and the rising red tint to his face was funnier by the second. “Any other moment and I would have left immediately, but I had to make—”

“Maybe tell that story later, Thor. You’re about to give Steve and Bruce joint conniptions,” Tony interrupted slyly.

Steve was, in fact, still being hugged by Thor through his explanation, and his face was one shade away from perfectly coordinating with a fire truck. Thor dropped him and patted him on the back. “My apologies, Captain!” But he was grinning too wide to be innocent, and Clint would bet real money he’d used the word orgasm on purpose just to make Steve squirm.

“Congratulations, buddy,” Clint said, high-fiving Thor as the big, blonde troll made his way past.

Clint imagined that Steve could probably draw the dramatic shift in Thor’s expression from smug to sorrow to barely-restrained admiration in a flip-book. “Clint, Bruce told me little of the Son of Coul’s reappearance, but what other shock would be worthy enough to cause you to so utterly fail with your own bow!”

Clint grimaced uncomfortably. “You’re not wrong. Thanks for pointing it out.”

He felt all eyes turn to him, but Tony took over before he was forced to acknowledge it. Clint couldn’t remember being this thankful for Tony so many times in one day, but then again, today seemed to be the day for the unexpected.

No one tried to force Clint into the conversation, and he was more than fine with sitting back and just taking it in. They shouted a lot, Thor because that was his natural state on a good day, and Steve and Tony because Tony was a god-awful loser, and Steve had a thing for poking the bear. Natasha and Bruce were nearly as quiet as Clint, but the whole thing almost felt normal. For a while.

“Are you still here, not hunting him down, because of me?” Clint asked Nat, almost too quiet to hear, about three hours later. Thor was snoring on the floor a few feet away, and Clint could hear Tony and Steve fake-bickering in the kitchen over what to do with the mass of leftovers. He felt that ugly bit of jealousy sticking up in his chest at that, but he swallowed it back down quickly. Being jealous of his friends’ bad flirting was one step too far.

Natasha had her shoulder leaning against Clint’s, and head tipped back against the couch, but he knew better than to assume she was asleep. “I don’t want to search,” she said finally, her voice just as quiet as his had been. “I don’t want to be forced into hunting him down. Having to track him, when for all intents and purposes he’s perfectly fine, it feels…insulting.”

Clint shifted and wrapped his arm around her, happy when she let him do it. He could tell there was something more she wanted to say, and he waited, measuring his breaths against hers, the way they’d done after the battle for New York.

“I know why you want to see him,” she said simply, words coming out as little more than clipped whispers. “And I can even understand, from a logistical perspective, why he wouldn’t bring us in on the op. I just don’t think the logistics of it matter to me. It was more than just an insult to our capabilities. He didn’t toss aside respect, or professional curtsey, he tossed _us_ aside. That’s what it feels like, regardless of his intent. And what we have here, now, is…this is different.”

He knew what she meant – could feel the difference in his bones and had known it for some time. These weren’t just people he was proud to fight alongside, but people he was happy to be around. Happy to know and be known by. With the backgrounds he and Natasha had, that was a rare and valuable thing. Once upon a time, they’d had Strike Team Delta, and that was the first real _family_ feeling Clint could remember having outside of the complicated relationship he’d had with Barney and the circus, but the Avengers were something else altogether. Sure, Steve was the leader, but he was more of a defacto-leader that was agreed upon by everyone than the handler Coulson had been for Clint and Natasha. As close as the three of them were – _had_ been – there was always SHIELD hanging over their heads, and though the lines of authority were bent and twisted to all hell, they never quite severed.

Maybe that was a part of the reason behind Coulson’s decision to leave them in the cold. No one said feelings had to run both ways, after all, and Coulson was nothing if not a company man. Maybe Clint had thought otherwise, once, but now…now it was pretty clear. Clint understood Natasha better than he wished he did, and he agreed with her more than he ever would have seen himself doing before.

Part of him wanted to just write Phil off – to put it all on Agent Coulson where they went from here, if they ever saw each other again.

But Clint didn’t work like that and knew he never would, as much as he wished he could be different. Natasha knew it to.

Clint shifted uncomfortably, and she jabbed him in the side for jostling her. He pressed his lips to the top of her head, emotions growing too big for his heart. When he could trust his voice again, he said; “Yeah, it’s good. Real good.” The words weren’t even close to matching what was going on inside his head, but he trusted her to know him well enough to understand anyway.

She hummed an affirmation, and reached her hand up to grab his, intertwining their fingers and squeezing once before letting go. Nearly to quiet for him to hear, she whispered; “That doesn’t mean you can’t want more.”

\----

BEFORE

Clint had never been able to break himself of the habit of wanting more. One would think that after all the life shit Clint had been dealt, all he’d caused and been a part of, that he would know better than to want things too often or too deeply. Most of the time it didn’t matter, because he wanted more for other people – wanted to help more than he wanted the selfish stuff. But there were other things, too, that he couldn’t shake. He wanted a life where he didn’t have to run, one where he could do what he was good at without hating himself for it, one that could maybe last more than a few weeks before it fell apart.

He knew better than to hold onto those wants, though, and instead got into the habit of pretending he wanted the exact opposite.

 _No thanks, I_ like _hoping temporary safe house to temporary safe house, killing and working for money from people I can never, ever trust._

 _No, I_ like _being alone. I’m better off going it alone._

Then along came SHIELD. Not that he could really trust the people in charge there, but it was clear from the start that there were people in-between that wanted the same things he did. Or at least pretended to, and that was a hell of a lot more than the people he’d worked with in the past had managed. Along came Phil, and Natasha, and Bobbi, and Jess.

When the _thing_ with Phil started, it wasn’t the sex that scared him. It was the thing where Phil would leave behind reminder notes in his own office before he went on a mission that were just for Clint. It was the thing where Clint would come by with food every now and then while they did paper work together, or rather Phil did paper work and Clint did anything but. The thing where Phil let him rest in his private, off-site apartment in Brooklyn when Clint got injured enough to wind up with bed-rest, and Clint got to see even more of the man behind the badge.

It was a good view. A really good view.

And he wanted it too much. All of it.

“What do you want from Grouchy’s?” Phil asked him one night from across the room.

Clint turned his head away from the Conspiracy Board, or at least that’s what it was starting to look like with all the pictures and data he had pinned across it over the past three hours. He smirked. “I really hope Ken hears you calling him that one day.”

“And if he does, I’ll remind him you started it.”

Clint scoffed, rolling his eyes. “He expects that kind of sass from me. You’re the one people expect to be calm and respectable. And Kung Pao, obviously.”

“Kung Pao from Grouchy’s? Ken doesn’t think you’re disrespectful.”

“Oh yes he does, remember last month? Don’t give me your purist crap, either, they do a great Kung Pao. You’ve been infected by the hipster need to get everything authentic.”

“It’s not hipster, it’s rational. I’ll give you last month, though. You were a dick.”

Clint couldn’t remember when exactly they started the habit of holding two conversations at once because he only realized they did that two weeks before, when Natasha had rolled her eyes and mimed gagging at him over Phil’s shoulder. “Rational? Well Ken was born in LA and so was his mom. If you want authentic from him, get a Smartwater. But I own my occasional dick-itude, it’s all a part of the charm.”

Usually, Clint could do a decent – even good – job of pushing aside things he’d rather not think about. The fact that he and Phil acted around each other the way that long-time partners did, the way that old married coupled did, was one of those things better left off in a corner to only revisit at three AM when he couldn’t sleep. Not that he’d been doing a great job of ignoring those things lately.  

He turned back to the board to chase out that train of thought, squinting at the gridlines of Chicago like if he closed his eyes right, he’d suddenly see a pattern.

Phil grumbled something from behind him, and Clint flipped him the bird for good measure.  

It was easy. Seamless. Familiar.

Why mess with that?

Then Phil looked at him over his shoulder, giving him one of those rare, private smiles. At least they felt private to Clint, the way they were small, subtle, and only cropped up when it was just the two of them. And yeah, so maybe that was why.

Or maybe it was how when Clint woke up the next morning, sprawled out on Phil’s couch, he had a blanket draped over his torso and a bottle of water on the table behind his head. It was half past six in the morning, Phil was probably in the shower, and Clint couldn’t help but imagining waking up beside him and bickering about his obnoxiously early morning routine of running at five, showering at six, on the road to work by seven.

And Phil would have the coffee pot ready to go when Clint rolled out of bed ten minutes before they needed to leave. He’d toss him a granola bar or something from whatever other health kick he was onto that week. They’d ease each other, smile, knock shoulders. But they already did most of that. Just without the waking up in the same room.

Most of the time he was content with what they had. Content with being around Phil in any way he could.

But when Phil walked out of the bathroom in his pressed slacks and undershirt, asking Clint what he did with his brown belt the last time Clint had raided Phil’s closet for an undercover op, Clint couldn’t help dreaming up that little bit more.

\----

AFTER

Typing in the number was easy – of course it was, it was nothing more than pressing buttons on a screen. _Clint, get it together_. And yet, somehow, hitting the send button seemed impossible.

He stared at the green circle.

Waited.

Felt his heart try to crawl its way up his throat.

 _How was New Mexico?_ That was an easy opener. He’d practiced. It would subtly let Phil know Clint was on to his shit, and that Phil could try to hide all he wanted, but Clint would still know that he was alive, and out there, and not dead. That Phil was somewhere breathing air and looking at things and – _oh god_ – Clint felt like he was a few seconds away from a mental break, and he couldn’t do anything but stare at the stupid clump of pixels.

He imagined being on a rooftop. The feeling of the air on his face and the split second of time between standing still and jumping over the edge. He didn’t have to think in those moments, he just jumped. No worry. Only action.

And then the phone was ringing. _Aw, hand, no._

The click indicating the call had been picked up on the other end seemed so much louder than it should have, and Clint wacked himself in the cheekbone in his rush to get the phone to his ear.

“How’s the weather up there?” Phil’s voice.

Clint’s heart didn’t drop, it disappeared. Suddenly, there was a gaping vacuum of air in his chest and then the voice, _Phil’s_ voice, on the other end cleared its throat. It was a code phrase – one of their first, if Clint remembered right – and Phil was waiting on the answer.

Clint heard his own voice like it was coming from somewhere else. Surely it wasn’t coming from him – he didn’t think he could breathe again just yet. “Mostly sunny, but it looks like the clouds are about to roll in any second now.” His own voice was gravely and rough, like he’d just woken up from a bender.

He heard the voice on the other end make a huffing sound, and then; “ _Clint_.”

The sound of his name shocked a noise from his throat that Clint would never in a million years admit to another living soul. His chest contracted and wouldn’t release. He saw his free hand shake, but he couldn’t feel a damn thing.

Suddenly, it was all real.

He’d been wrong. He couldn’t do this.

He tore the thing from his ear and ended the call as fast as he could.

The phone clattered to the floor, without Clint remembering ever making the decision to let it go.

Clint slipped down the side of bed next to it, numb and vaguely aware his hands were shaking.

He sat there, motionless, starting at absolutely nothing for a while before he felt the painful twinge in his chest that protested his slumped posture.

_Why did I think I could do this?_

Because Phil’s voice in his ear was the one thing that had grounded him from the very beginning, that was why.

From that very first op together, before Clint was even able to put a name to that voice, much less a face to the name, that voice had done what a revolving door of handlers and senior operatives had never been able to: set Clint Barton straight. More so than Natasha, than the weight of his bow, more than anything he’d ever been able to build for himself; the memories of Phil’s voice reminded Clint who he was, and who he wanted to be.

He’d almost forgotten what it sounded like when Phil was genuinely surprised, seeing how Phil had hardly ever let it happen in the field. Even when it had, Phil was the type of guy – the type of agent – to never broadcast it. And yet that had been shock he heard in Phil’s voice just then, Clint was certain. He kept hearing it over and over in his head, and he had no idea what it meant that Phil was openly shocked, even over the phone.

Clint damn well did not want to be the guy sitting on the floor of his room, wallowing in the feeling of the world being swept out from under him. Something worse than that, because Clint usually felt good when the world was literally swept from under him. Maybe it was more that the world had been shoved back under his feet too soon. Sooner than expected. Way sooner, really, since he had never expected Phil to come back.

Not that he _was_ back. Phil was with his team, now. His new team.

All of a sudden, the phone was back in his hands and he was hitting redial.

He didn’t wait for the damn code phrase this time. “What the hell, Phil?” he spat out, quick enough that he couldn’t change his mind. He ignored the way Phil’s name felt on his tongue after having avoided speaking it for so long. When it came down to it, he couldn’t call him anything but Phil, even over the phone. _Fuck_.

“Ah, what are you referring to? The letter or the…other issue?” If Phil’s voice sounded hoarse, Clint was determined not to acknowledge it. What right did Phil think he had, sounding like that? After _this_?

“Both. All of it.” Clint blinked, trying to find the right words. He was never great with those, but Phil was god knew where, so words were all Clint had to work with. “You’re talking to me,” he blurted out, stupidly.

“Yes I am. I didn’t think I would be.”

Clint let out a harsh laugh, feeling weirdly out-of-body as he did. “Because you weren’t planning on telling me. Yeah, I can see how you’re the one with a right to be shocked right now.”

“No, Clint, that’s not…that’s not what I meant.”

“Isn’t it? What, were you planning on sticking it out a few more months and popping out of a cake on the _fourth_ anniversary of your—” His voice just gave out at the end, cut off before he could really lose it, and _god_ , was he losing it.

Clint shut his eyes as tight as they would go, gripping the phone hard enough that if he was Cap, it’d be shattered into thousands of pieces. Maybe that would have been more satisfying.

He could hear the sound of Phil’s breathing on the other end, knew Phil was waiting patiently for Clint to get his shit together, and that was almost too much to handle. Anger, frustration, exasperation, or ambivalence – those reactions Clint knew how to work with. He’d never been good at knowing how to handle Phil being patient with him. Always so damn patient.

“It wouldn’t have been a cake. Maybe a pizza delivery disguise,” Phil said, his Agent-Coulson-Calm bellied by the uncertain waver in his voice.

The intended joke didn’t land, it just pissed Clint off. “That’s real funny. Considering you weren’t planning on telling me shit.”

“Clint, there’s so much more that you—”

“Don’t know? Whose fucking fault do you think that is?” He hung up again, this time chucking the phone across the room. It crashed into the wall with a loud bang, but it didn’t make him feel any better. Stupid fucking phone.

His shoulders started to shake, and he distantly realized he was sobbing, gulps of breath racking his body, but he refused to let go of a single tear. He was not going to cry because of this again, for fuck’s sake.

He wished he was strong enough to let go of the way his name sounded when Phil said it. Maybe it had all been in his head back before the Avengers, but Clint always thought the way Phil said _Clint_ was unlike anyone else. Maybe it was just because Phil used to call him Agent Barton during work hours, or if he was feeling really sassy, just plain old _Barton_ , so the switch to his first name always felt a little special, like it was something just between them. Or maybe it was because Clint had been so hopelessly in love with the bastard that anything out of Phil’s mouth sounded good.

And that part was true. Still true, as it turned out.

Only it didn’t used to hurt quite like this.

\----

BEFORE

“Barton,” Coulson answered the call immediately, sounding calm as calm could be.

Clint took a deep breath in and made eye contact with the Black Widow, who was casually sitting across from him in a hostel room, seventeen miles south of where he was supposed to have been two days ago for evac. He’d made the decision to save her, then help her take out the cartel that was gunning for her head, and now…now he was on the phone with a man who no doubt thought Clint had betrayed them all.

“Coulson.”

“Barton, where are you? I’m assuming the cartel was your doing? It looked like your handiwork was involved.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, sir,” Clint said slowly, unsure of what was happening. The Widow tapped her wrist, reminding him of the time. “Felt like helping out Space Ghost and I’m hard pressed for a clue.” And he hung up, with less than two seconds to spare.

“You better be certain of this decision, Hawkeye,” Widow said evenly. “How will he know?”

The truth was that Clint didn’t know whether Coulson would make the leap to the Jan reference and then piece together they were above the January Massage Parlor, but it relied on Coulson being a nerd, and from what Clint had seen so far on the missions they’d had together, the guy was a total dork. And they’d talked about Space Ghost before. Maybe twice.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether Romanoff thought he could actually pull off what he said.

Clint was shit-scared, but not of her. She’d had every opportunity to kill him since he landed in Budapest, and yet here they were. No, if anyone was going to kill him, it would be Agent Coulson. Hell knew what Clint would do if he were in that man’s position, but it sure as shit wouldn’t be listening calmly to the asshole crazy enough to defy every order and save the target instead of putting arrows through her kneecaps like he was told. Then again, Coulson hadn’t let him down so far. Despite everything, Coulson kept surprising him. _Just one more surprise, sir. That’s all I need._

“We don’t have much of a choice,” Clint said for the fourth time. At this point he wasn’t sure which of them he was trying to convince. “They’ll hunt us down as long as we’re alive, it’s better to know where we stand before my leeway runs out.”

Her eyes didn’t narrow so much as gave the general impression of scrutinizing him. “You’re too trusting.”

“I’ll get us out of here either way. But I have to try the peaceful route first.”

Two hours of pacing later, there was a knock on the door. Clint breathed a sigh of relief that Phil had understood his impromptu code, but he didn’t have long to bask in that feeling. Agent Coulson entered with his weapon drawn, and Clint only help up his hands and gestured to the empty room. Widow was outside, presumedly biding her time in the room next door, having climbed across the adjoining balcony.

“It’s just us.”

“You went rogue,” Coulson said simply, not lowering his weapon.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You made certain promises when you joined, Agent Barton. Some of them directly to me.”

“And I haven’t broken any of them,” Clint argued as calmly and emphatically as he could manage at the same time. “It takes seventy-two hours to be dubbed a threat without taking action against SHIELD. And I called you first, didn’t I?”

There was a long pause before Coulson holstered the gun and sat down on the only chair in the room. Clint wanted to sag in relief, but he couldn’t. Not with her life on the line, too. “After two days of radio silence, how did you know I would be here?”

Clint sat down on the bed across from him before answering. “I didn’t.” Calling Coulson at all had been a gamble, but Clint had promised him that if he was going to do something stupid, he’d let Coulson know. He hadn’t known Coulson would come for him for certain, after all, Coulson was supposed to be back in DC, but he’d had a feeling. Turns out it was the right one.

“Coulson—”

“Don’t _Coulson_ me. Explain,” he said calmly. His eyes were tight around the edges, but he was sitting there, waiting.

Clint deflated. He didn’t want to be on guard with Coulson of all people, it just felt wrong. He was still pretty confident Coulson wouldn’t shoot him, anyway. It was Romanoff he was worried about. “I had to make the call.”

“And you couldn’t have spoken with me, first? She is wanted in more countries than almost any other active criminal on SHIELD’s radar, and that’s just the crimes she’d been linked to, we know there are plenty more we don’t have enough to pin on her.”

“You know they just would have taken her out on their own if I said anything hinting that I was going to let her go. You _know_ they would have.”

“They’re your team, Clint, they had their orders the same as you did. And in cutting off contact, you put them in jeopardy.”

“Yes, I did, but I wouldn’t have done that if there were any other way. Angleton was on the field. We both know he would have shot the minute I let slip any reservations I had. And then what? She’d be dead.”

Phil stared him down, lips pursed. He didn’t sigh through his nose the way he did when he was exasperated but Clint still had some wiggle room left. Clint wasn’t even sure the guy was breathing. Then he asked, simply, “Why?”

“Because I _knew_ that look she had in her eyes,” Clint answered right away, “I know exactly what it takes to get a person to the point where she’d let me get her perfectly in my sights when _no_ other shooter has managed that for the entire time she’s been operating. I’m good enough to know when a target like that is letting me win. It was a cry for help, Coulson. I couldn’t just take her down.”

“You’re basing all of this on a look? Tell me you understand how that sounds.”

“You said you trusted me.”

Phil breathed through his nose. “Are you proving me wrong?”

“No,” Clint stressed, shaking his head emphatically. “She has information, and she wants to come in. Can we get her a deal?”

“That depends on the information on offer.” Phil said slowly, tensing again. “Barton, where is she?”

Clint held up both hands in surrender. “Hear us out. Please. I won’t ask anything of you ever again.”

“Agent Barton—”

“I am here, Agent Coulson,” Natasha said calmly, stepping out from the hallway. Clint hadn’t heard her move, much less get back in the building, but he supposed he should have anticipated that much by now. “What Barton says is true.”

The three of them spent the better part of four hours discussing and planning their options. It had taken Natasha one hour to convince Phil her information was something SHIELD wanted, and another that she wouldn’t try to kill them on the way there. Clint remembered next to none of the conversations and negotiations that went down that night – it was a business deal more than anything, as much as bargaining for a woman’s life could be business.

What he did remember were the moments he had alone with Coulson after, when Natasha was taken in for screening.

Clint had spent the entire flight by her side, the SHIELD agents kept at bay with the combined might of Clint’s stone-cold expression and the slight shake of Coulson’s head when they looked to him for back-up. Coulson had been on the phone, working to secure them a safe route not only back into the country but into SHIELD itself. Bringing the Black Widow home alive hadn’t been on anyone’s agenda, and from the sound of Phil’s calm responses, they were less than thrilled about only having a tight five hours to prep.

Coulson hadn’t spared him a second glance in all that time. Clint wasn’t sure what that meant. It hadn’t happened before. Then again, it wasn’t every day the resident stray brought home another one.

After, Clint stood outside the room they had brought Natasha into, an uneasy feeling crawling under his skin. He still had the residuals of that lingering, hyper-aware state he’d been in for the past few days, despite knowing his fear of having Natasha out of his sight was ridiculous. Coulson wouldn’t let them do anything to her, for one, and there was no way Fury would let them jeopardize the information she was offering. She would be fine. She could also take care of herself as far as Clint had seen, and this probably wasn’t her at her best.

“I think we should talk in my office.”

He turned his head to see Phil standing behind him, pocketing his Blackberry, looking as calmly competent as he ever did. Clint looked back to the closed door and the two agents stationed on either side. They hadn’t let him into the observation room on account of the probation and pending psych evals he had coming his way. “How long is that going to take?”

“You’ll be happy to know she was just as worried about you. From my understanding, she thinks you’ll be punished by someone tougher than the shrinks, which shows how little she knows about our psychology staff. But this is a conversation that should be held elsewhere, don’t you think?” He must have seen something in Clint because his tone was gentler when he added, “They’ll alert me when they’re done, and I’ll tell you as soon as I hear.”

Clint relented, straightening his back and nodding. If he was going in for a dressing down, he’d do it with what little dignity he still had, thanks.

Inside Coulson’s office, Clint bean pacing, unable to just stand there and take what was coming, not with all the questions rolling around his head. “You never said what convinced you to trust us.”

“No, I didn’t,” Coulson agreed, crossing his arms and stopping right with his back to the door as soon as he closed it. Clint stopped pacing and faced him, waiting for the rest, fearing the worst. “It was after I made sure you weren’t compromised.”

Clint blinked as understanding hit him like brick. “You thought she, what, drugged me?”

“Possibly. You seemed to have formed a bond with her very quickly.”

Clint recoiled at that thinly veiled accusation. “We didn’t _sleep_ together if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

The very thought of it made Clint feel sick, and even more so when he thought of how Natasha had come to that same conclusion at first, that Clint must want her in that way, that it was the only reasonable explanation he could possibly have for wanting to save her. It spoke to the kind of treatment she was accustomed to more than anything else, and it had broken Clint’s heart in a way he hadn’t expected to feel when face-to-face with the legendary Black Widow.

“She trusts you,” Coulson said frankly, apparently having already made up his mind about whether Clint was full of shit or not. Clint just wasn’t sure which way Coulson was swinging, as per usual.

He shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. I don’t think she trusts anyone. I’m just the person that’s shown an interest in her well-being, so we have a common goal as far as she’s concerned. Probably helps that I’m good with a bow in a pinch.”

Coulson inclined his head. “But you trust her?”

Clint didn’t have to debate that one. “Yes, sir. She wants in, Coulson,” he stressed for the hundredth time. “We both know I’ve been where she is, and she’s already miles ahead of where I was when you found me if she already knows it.”

Coulson just watched him for a moment in that quiet, analyzing way he had. Clint did his damnedest not to fidget under that stare. “SHIELD can’t trust her to work on her own the way she’s accustomed to, you realize,” he finally said.

“So then stick her with me.” Clint hadn’t thought of the idea until it was out coming of his mouth, but he felt it in his gut. It was right. And not because he felt responsible for her, or because she’d already saved his ass twice since they’d met, but because she was one of the best he’d ever seen, and Clint was pretty damn good, too.

Coulson paused, studying him. “You’d be staking your reputation on any and all of her actions, you understand.”

“I’ll vouch for her. You did it for me, didn’t you?”

“Yes…”

“So, do it. Put her with me. I know SHIELD is down a strike force since last month, you can make a new one out of the two of us.”

“If she screws up, betrays us, goes down for anything, it means you will too,” Coulson pointed out carefully. “Don’t you want to wait and see how she does with integration and all the initial training, first?”

Clint shook his head. “I think she’ll do better if she can get out sooner rather than make her wait for months, cooped up in here. Fury would never let an asset like her collect dust, anyhow. Besides, look at her record. Look at what we did in a handful of days – you can’t tell me you don’t think her scores are gonna blow more than a few top agents out of the water.”

“That’s your profession opinion?”

“I’m not messing around here, Coulson.”

“No, for once I think you’re completely serious,” Coulson agreed. He strode around to his file cabinet, filtered through the documents for a minute, then pulled out a folder. He flipped it open and handed it to Clint without a word. Clint’s eyes went wide as he stared at the request forms already half filed out.

“This has my name on it,” Clint pointed out, stupidly.

Coulson only nodded.

“And yours. You…you want me on _your_ strike force?”

“You, and Natasha Romanoff. If you really believe in her that strongly.”

Clint flipped through the pages and saw the blank spaces where her name could go, and where Clint was supposed to sign his own. Coulson had already signed all of his. Maybe it was the lack of sleep and constant running he’d been doing without ever having a chance to come down from the adrenaline high, but Clint’s brain wouldn’t make sense of it.

“Why?” He asked in a small voice, staring at the signatures.

“Because. I believe in you. I trust your gut instincts almost as much as my own. I have for long time.” Clint looked back up at him, confused. “I’ve had those papers ready for six months,” Coulson clarified. “I was just waiting to find the right person to pair you with. You two took down a cartel together and evaded some of our best SHIELD agents for two and a half consecutive days, I think you’ve proven you can work together.”

“I…yes. Thank you.” All of a sudden, his throat felt too thick to swallow. “I won’t let you down, sir.”

“You haven’t so far,” Coulson agreed, and Clint could have sworn he saw Coulson smile for a split second. It was just a little half-smile, but it was more than Clint usually earned. “I’m proud of you, Agent Barton.”

And really, there was no going back from that point on. It was the beginning of the end, and Clint was already halfway gone.

\----

PHIL

Phil sat there, unable to move, unable to tell how much time had passed before he slowly placed the phone faced-down on his desk. Tears were out of the question – they were on their way to investigate a new Inhuman situation in Jacksonville. But he should be crying, shouldn’t he?

There should be tears to match the shame he felt inside. Red eyes and heaving breaths to mirror the crushing pain that had spent years building up tension, readying to snap him in two.

Had anyone asked the Phillip J. Coulson of three and a half years ago what the sound of Clint Barton’s hatred would do to him, that Phillip might have given a glib response, but he would have been competently unable to express the way he imagined his world dimmed beyond repair, with a private breakdown on the side.

Phil didn’t have time for a breakdown. There was too much at stake, too many people relying on his current stability, even if it was tenuous at best.

And yet.

And yet there had been hate in Clint’s voice. Maybe resentment, too, if Phil wanted to dig the knife deeper into his own side. And pain. Phil couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard pain like that in Clint’s voice. It didn’t belong there. It was wrong. And Phil was the reason for it.

His fingers itched to reach for the phone. To call Clint and... But it was Clint's decision. 

Phil took a deep breath, forcing it to keep steady, in and out, and reminded himself there was work to be done. He would wait for Clint to be ready to talk. If he was never ready, Phil could deal with that reality when it came time. For now...there were people who needed him.

\----

CLINT

The things Clint Barton had never been very good at outside of a sniper’s nest (but also sometimes in the nest) included but were not limited to: waiting, keeping his mouth shut, maintaining a brain-to-mouth filter, not pushing boundaries, following orders, and sitting on his hands when he could be out _there_.

That isn’t to say that he never went with the flow. On the contrary, most days life felt like one thing after another and he was just along for the ride, and he was damn good at rolling with the punches. It was that sort of attitude that let him rage and taunt Thor over Wii Sports, vehemently denying that he was getting demolished, all while a larger part of him still felt raw from betrayal. It was why he could quip with Tony and mean it when he laughed (even if the feeling wasn’t the same as it was last week), and not show an ounce of the fear, elation, and devastation that was rolling around his skull.

It kept him Steve’s eye-in-the-sky, even if he was forced into using only small firearms because of his damn chest wound. _That_ Captain America decision had led to one hell of a fight (that Clint had lost: “ _it’s_ _this or you’re benched completely”)._  

Natasha said he should feel happy that Steve and the rest of the team cared enough about his well-being to get in a shouting match over Clint trying to use his recurve bow, but if that were true, _Natasha_ , then they should have been just as happy that he wanted to be out there, flying the jet and covering their backs like he always did. Clint might not have had super powers, nor was he a _literal god_ , but there was a reason he was an Avenger and it wasn’t just because of the way he pulled off a tac suit.

He could tell himself that his roll-with-the-punches attitude was also why it had been just under a week since coming home from the hospital, and he hadn’t left the premises for anything other than some light Avenger-ing that one time.

He had Tony’s algorithm scanning the news for suspicious activity, and he had blanket acceptance from Nat to go _,_ but he…wasn’t. He _could_ – the team would forgive him for ducking out for a few days, maybe even weeks depending on how well Phil’s new team covered their tracks – Clint knew that. Kate might make a fuss, but when did she not when it came to Clint being a dumbass? And by the full-week mark, he knew he was being a dumbass.

But the truth was that Clint was scared shitless.

At the same time, all he wanted to do was run the whole damn way to wherever Phil was and hug him until neither of them could breathe. And maybe get in a solid punch, but hey, he never claimed to be over it, the being left behind thing. He really, _really_ , wasn’t over it.

Part of him knew Nat was just as messed up as he was about it, that Phil had found a new Strike Team Delta, a new family to replace them. _Three years_ – of course he would have moved on by then. Phil was never one to sit around and let someone else do the dirty work, and Clint would have to be a moron to ever think otherwise.

He texted Kate instead of delving any farther down that rabbit hole.

**To K:** _Hey Hawkeye, how goes the day off?_

Her response came quicker than usual.

 **From K:** _Ha ha_ **.** _Did you get shot again?_ (Followed by bullseye and skull-and-crossbones emojis.)

**To K:** _Not yet but the day is still young_

**From K:** _Unlike you. BURN._

He was about to type out something hilarious and cutting, but his phone buzzed with another text.

**From K:** _I can look after Lucky for a few more days if you want._

He frowned. They had a sort of co-dog-parenting thing going on recently. Sometimes Kate would take him for a week or two – or, as the case currently was, whenever Clint fucked up bad enough to get sent to the hospital and put on Avenger’s Watch. It wasn’t that it was extremely weird she’d want to sneak in more Lucky time, but still. He was getting underlying-motives vibes from that text. He hoped she hadn’t gotten into a fight with America.

**To K:** _You alright?_

**From K:** _Duh. It’ll just be one less thing to worry about when you trek across the country to give Agent Coulson a swift kick from me_

Ah. That would be the underlying motive. He knew better than to ask how she knew about that.

**To K:** _Who says I’m trekking anywhere? Stark hasn’t kicked me out yet._

There was a longer pause before her next message.

 **From K:** _I can’t tell if you’re joking because you’re trying to lie, or you’re just being sarcastic. You know sarcasm doesn’t translate over text as well as you think it does._

**To K:** _Not lying._

Another long pause.

**From K:** _Between you, the Black Widow, and all of Iron Man’s money, you really can’t find him?_

**To K:** _You left out Captain America’s boy scout resolve for justice._

**From K:** _Holy shit, Clint_

**To K:** _I hung up on him. Twice._

**From K:** _He called?_

**To K:** _I called._

**From K:** _Omg_

**To K:** _Yeah, I know._

**From K:** _No, really. Oh. My. God._

**To K:** _Thanks for the support_

**From K:** _You texted me because you’re leaving town, aren’t you?_

Clint felt that tight pressure building up in his chest again.

 **To K:** _I don’t know_

**From K:** _But you called, and he answered? Seems pretty 2+2 to me_

**From K:** _How many people get a second chance like this? Maybe he deserves the silent treatment, but you don’t._

When Clint didn’t respond fast enough, Kate texted again.

**From K:** _That’s it. I’m coming over._

**To K:** _What, to the Tower?_

**From K:** _Uh,_ _Lucky isn’t allowed there?? You hit your head or something, Hawkeye?_

**To K** _: Only a mild concussion_

**From K:** _Then you have no excuses. I’ll bring the Pizza Dog and you call in the thin crust._

\----

When Kate had said that Lucky wasn’t allowed in the Tower, it was technically true. Tony had a big no-no policy on animals of any kind – including Sam’s bird. The living one, to be precise, and sometimes even the tech one that Sam tended to treat creepily enough like a real Falcon, regardless of its status as a robot. Clint didn’t judge too much. Sam was an unsettlingly stable kind of dude and was suspiciously lacking in debilitating emotional baggage. You didn’t get to be an Avenger without at least one weird hang-up under your belt, so as far as weird shit went, treating a metal bird like a feathery one was weak sauce.

But Lucy himself wasn’t _specifically_ banned. You couldn’t ban something you didn’t know about, and technically, Tony didn’t know Lucky existed.

It wasn’t that Clint was ashamed of his one-eyed wonder, hell no. He just neglected to mention the building he sort of owned and operated in his non-Avenging time, and the Pizza Dog came hand in hand with that part of his life. So did all of the people living in said building, of whom Clint was their landlord/protector, and they also went unmentioned. Logically.

Natasha was the exception, because when was she not the exception to everything? Kate was too, but Kate was a Hawkeye and so that was completely different. Logically.

Clint got a weird feeling in the pit of his stomach when he realized, had his injuries been any less severe, he might not have seen the note Phil left on his bed for weeks. He’d gotten the building after a thing with the Russian Mob in the wake of the battle of New York, after Phil’s death. _Supposed death_. Fuck, was he ever going to get used to that? But that meant Phil wouldn’t have known that Clint split his time between the Tower and the apartment, and Clint would have probably disappeared to lick his wounded pride after getting caught out in the open by a half-assed, mall security level sniper, instead of crashing in his suite at the Tower…

He shoved the what-if’s out of his head for now, and focused on the real problem at hand.

Now, as a result of the Avengers-minus-Nat not knowing about Bed-Stuy, the complicated part about going to meet Kate was that he was that he couldn’t just bribe Happy or another one of Tony’s corporate slaves to drive him over. He prodded the bandage under his shirt, considering his options.

Sitting in a nest with a gun or two was one thing, but taking his bike (or Steve’s – Tony had added tons of cool shit to Steve’s) across Manhattan while still feeling the pain of the gunshot wound every time he moved was on another level. Not that he’d admit it to anyone else, but one too-sharp turn and he might black out for a second. Not something one usually aims for while riding a motorcycle through traffic.

But he’d told Kate he’d be there, and that was that. Hawkeyes didn’t bail on each other.

And that was how he ended up phoning for pizza delivery in the back of the worst cab he’d been in since Nairobi in ’07, and calling it quits about four miles out from his building and walking.

In retrospect, walking was a terrible idea.

The pizza guy beat him there, and so did Kate and Lucky. He fumbled the key into the lock eventually and hobbled into the apartment holding his ribs with his other hand.

“Long time no see, Katie-Kate,” he said lightly, but even he had to admit his delivery was shit.

Kate was sprawled out on the couch, and her mouth, full of pizza, hung open when she got a look at him.

“How much did your pops pay for finishing school again? He might wanna look into a refund policy.” Clint teased. Lucky seemed just as shocked to see him, but infinitely more joyful as he flung himself from Kate’s side, barking up a storm and bounding over to plow right into Clint’s shins.

The force of it nearly knocked Clint flat, but he caught himself on the wall with a painful intake of breath. “Aw, Lucky, down dog,” he grumbled, trying and failing horrifically to lever himself back up to a standing position that didn’t make him look like someone who had invasive surgery less than a week ago.

Kate cursed a blue streak as she rushed over to help him to the couch. “Jesus, Clint, tell me you didn’t walk all the way here from SI. Not even you could be that stupid.”

“I did not!” he asserted, hand to his chest in mock offense, but also because: ow. “Just the last four miles or so,” he added in casually.

The joke didn’t play out as well as he’d hoped. Kate shook her head, incredulous. She looked like she was about to say something, but instead she threw up her hands and stormed off the kitchen.

“Any chance I could get—”

“I’m making you coffee, but you _so_ do not deserve it!” she shouted back.

Clint grinned and patted the couch for Lucky to hop up next to him. “Hey boy, miss me? Yeah you did. Ow, no, watch the ribs. And the chest. Yeah, that arm’s fine, good boy.”

“You look like shit,” Kate told him matter-of-factly as she handed him the fresh mug.

He hummed and inhaled as deep as he could before wincing, making Kate mutter under her breath again as she flopped down on the spare chair. “I feel fantastic,” he said. It would have been convincing too, had Lucky not chosen to dig his nose into Clint’s side again and cause Clint to gasp in pain.  

“Uh huh. You’re an idiot.”

“I’d argue with you, but this pizza smells really good and you look like you’re going to lecture me, so I’m just going to eat this now.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Don’t be dramatic.”

“Uh,” he said through a mouthful of pizza, “currently still healing from a gunshot wound. And a lingering concussion. And my friend is back from the dead. A pass is definitely owed to me.”

“Nuh-uh. You either feel fantastic, or you get to use excuses. Not both.”

He pouted at her, but she saw right through his shit. Sometimes having another Hawkeye as a friend was a pain in the ass.

“Are we going to talk about why you’re so afraid to talk to him?”

Right to the point, then.

Clint swallowed thickly and cleared his throat. He was going to need a hell of a lot more pizza for this. “I guess it’s the usual reasons. Take your pick.”

Kate flicked a pepperoni at his face, and Clint knocked it out of the air, grinning as Lucky flopped off the couch to catch it before it hit the floor. “Oh sure,” Kate droned on. “One of the usual reasons you’d be nervous about talking to a close friend who’s back from the dead. Because that happens all the time.”

Clint raised a brow and stuffed more food into his face. “Give it some time. You’re newer at this professional hero business, but you’ll come to regret that use of sarcasm. Trust me.”

“Then why is this guy so different?”

Fuck. He should have just gone to Thor and gotten plastered. Kate was too smart for Clint’s own good, and he liked her too much to seriously tell her to fuck off. Pepper would probably call that character development.

“This guy is Phil Coulson, for one.”

“Yeah, I know who Agent Coulson is. He’s the badass that looked like a tax consultant from the Midwest and killed someone with a paperclip one time. He’s the guy you only talk about when you’re extremely happy and relaxed, or approaching rock-bottom. You’ve admitted to stealing his pep-talks to use on me, and they’re pretty good when you remember them all the way, and every ex-SHIELD agent I’ve met seems half in awe of and half afraid of his mere memory. He was good obviously at dealing with people the way you are definitely not.” Kate pursed her lips and when she spoke again, her voice was gentle. “We’re Hawkeyes, we know how to pay attention to detail. Of course I get why he’s different for you, Clint. Are you sure that you do?”

“Was different. Past tense,” Clint corrected stiffly, clearing his throat. Lucky whined from his place at Clint’s feet, and Clint tossed him the rest of his slice.

“You don’t sound that sure about it.”

“Sure as houses.”

“I think that’s supposed to be, ‘safe as houses.’”

Clint chugged down the rest of his coffee, setting the mug down gingerly. “Katie…”

“I know. You’re the soft, stoic type who doesn’t let his marshmallow center show out of fear that someone will realize you’re not as hardened as you pretend to be.”

“And how many times have I let you paint my nails?”

Kate gave him a flat look, shifting to sit back in the cushions of the chair. “That’s because you couldn’t give less of a shit about that kinda thing. You should probably give at least _half_ a shit about your sartorial choices, though.”

He jabbed a finger in her direction. “You aren’t touching my t-shirts.” She’d tried it before, and it had led to an all-out war of the Hawkeyes.

“And you’re not changing the subject that easily,” Kate countered, not missing a beat. “Seriously, though. You look terrible, and not in the post-surgery way. Your eyes keep darting to your phone every few seconds, so don’t even try to pretend like you aren’t thinking about it. About him.”

Clint felt twitchy. He wanted to get up and move around, but damn, that walk had taken more out of him than he’d thought. He bounced his knees, tapped his fingers, but it wasn’t enough to ease the tension in his body. Nor was it enough to cover up the fact that Kate was hitting a nerve. Who the hell else would he be thinking about? Phil was in the back of his mind even before he’d come back from the dead, there was no way to push the thoughts out, now.

It also didn’t take a genius to figure out what Kate was trying to do, but because he was feeling petulant he argued, “He hasn’t called.”

“Probably because you hung up on him twice,” she deadpanned, then immediately looked sorry for it. “I mean, didn’t he leave you his number? Maybe he thinks the ball’s in your court?”

“Well he can take the stupid ball back,” Clint mumbled.

Kate got up from the chair and sat beside Clint. With her hand on his shoulder, she told him; “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but everyone and their blind grandmother can see that’s not the case here.”

Clint was quiet for a moment. He gave a weak attempt at a grin, turning his head to look at the open concern on his protégé’s face. “You know, I don’t think this is how the mentor-mentee relationship is supposed to work.”

“What are you talking about?” She groused. “You help me with my game, and I tell you to pull your head out of your ass, while slowly reminding you what it’s like to be young. It’s exactly like every buddy-cop movie ever made.”

“I’m going to pretend like you didn’t just call me old.”

“You have friendships that you made as a full-grown adult that are now over a decade old. You’re an old man, Hawkeye.”

Clint laughed, tackling her in a hug before she could get away.

“Ew, get off,” Kate protested, but she was giggling, too.

Clint ruffled her hair just to piss her off, and she knocked a right hook to his dodgy shoulder. “Ow! Seriously, etiquette school round two – you need it.”

Kate just rolled her eyes and bumped her shoulder into his. “Whatever.”

“Thanks, Katie-Kate.”

She tried to cover up her smile, but he caught it. She should know better by now. “You didn’t actually open up about anything, you know.”

Clint shrugged – ow – and slowly eased back into the couch. “I know you already know it all.”

Kate huffed out an exasperated sigh. “Yeah, but the talking thing is what helps. Saying it out loud. Come on, you can’t really be that macho: I’ve heard you butcher Celine Deion too many times to believe that.”

Clint let his eyes close as he tipped his head back, but he stuck out his tongue at her for good measure. “Don’t shame the classics, Padawan.” He could practically hear her crossing her arms in her silence. “Saying it out loud is like jinxing it at this point, and don’t bitch about my superstitions. Besides. Uh.” Clint swallowed, taking the beat to steel himself. “A lot’s happened. Nothing’s the same as it was.”

“That’s not always the way feelings work.”

“I’m old, I know things, trust me.”

“Yeah, old and emotionally repressed. You’ve never said one bad word about Bobbi Morse, and you two split up forever ago. You still love _her_ , don’t you?”

He did. Not in the same way he had in the beginning, to be sure, but he couldn’t just stop loving her. That wasn’t how he was built. It was one of those things that Natasha said made him different than the people she’d worked with before. His lack of an answer must have been enough to tell Kate she was right, because she kept going.

“And you loved _him_. I didn’t know you when he was around, or even right after the first battle of New York. So maybe I don’t have that much authority here, but it’s not much effort to piece the facts together.”

“I used to be a good spy-slash-assassin, once, believe it or not,” he told her dryly. He couldn’t help letting his guard slip around the people he loved, though. He was never too good about that, and he had the scars to prove it. But Kate wasn’t Trick or Swordsman. She wasn’t Barney. Not even a little. He sighed. “There’s just no easy answer here, Katie,” Clint admitted quietly.

She pressed up against his side, and he was more grateful for it than he could say. “You’ve never been the type to let other people make your decisions for you.” He frowned at her, confused. “You’re letting what you _think_ he wants decide how this goes for the both of you. Whether you’re right or not, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You showed me a better way to live, Clint. Maybe it’s time to take your own advice.”

\----

Kate took the empty boxes with her when she left (“ _you can’t brood and be surrounded by trash at the same time, that’s too depressing”),_ along with a promise to go shooting later in the week. He wanted to get her to try out his latest version of the shock arrows, see if she liked the weight of them, plus she really needed a refresher on the crossbow. Recurves and compounds were their favorites, but Hawkeyes needed versatility.

Now that she was gone, he was left alone to pick over what she’d said, and little to distract him from it. His phone was burning a hole in his pocket like never before, pacing the house wasn’t doing much for him, and it wasn’t long before he gave up and decided to just sleep it off. So things could be better.

But that damn phone…

He took it out. Stared at the flat black screen like maybe the feeling would go away if he just glared hard enough.

That wasn’t working.

Clint tossed the phone to the side, hearing it thump against the threadbare blanket on his bed.  

What he fuck was he doing? Moping? Brooding? Over a phone that wasn’t going to show him anything he wanted to see? What a moron. And Kate had been right. He _was_ waiting on Phil, wasn’t he? Waiting on Phil to make a move one way or the other, to make all the decisions for him.

That was it.

Clint snatched up the phone from where he’d thrown it.

He felt the well of frustration boil up as he typed in the number he’d committed to memory since that very first day. He couldn’t just say _hey,_ they were beyond that, now. And he didn’t want to call again. He knew what would happen: he’d get choked up and cut the call off just like he’d done the last two times. He didn’t think he wanted to hear Phil’s voice just now. He’d break.

He wouldn’t let himself go there again – couldn’t.

But he needed to do something.

**To Unknown:** _Fuck you._

Well it might not have been the most eloquent, but it was, technically, still something. He regretted hitting send the second his finger left the button. _Shit_. Damn his impulses, he could have come up with something better than that.

Clint dropped his phone with a yelp when it buzzed less than a minute later, the thing smacking the floor with a sound that would have meant a shattered screen if it hadn’t been Tony’s tech.

**From Unknown:** _Understandable._

No hello. No asking who Clint was. Did Phil know his number? Had he memorized it like Clint had, his? He felt the breath leave him in a choked-out sob.

**To Unknown:** _Yeah. You didn’t even leave a cheap Get Well Soon card, who does that?_

Crap. That was dumb. He really needed to proof-read his texts before sending them off.

Clint resented and treasured the giddy bubble that filled his chest when another text came in from Phil, feeling the anger and the wonder by turns, unable to figure out which one was the more important feeling. His eyes were too dry, throat too small, and he couldn’t keep the grin off his face no matter how hard he tried. It was insane. He was insane for doing this over text – having their first fucking conversation over _text_ , god, Kate would slap him if she knew…

And then Phil texted again, and Clint felt all the feelings all over again, mixed in with more anger at himself for not being able to sort any of it out.

**From Unknown:** _I suppose I don’t need to ask if this is really you._

**To Unknown:** _If either of us has the right to that question, I think it’s me._

**From Unknown:** _You’re right. How about I ask what made you decide to use the number I left?_

Clint stared down at his phone for the longest time. He wondered if Phil was thinking about the multiple times Clint had called just to hang up. He wondered how Phil felt about it, if he felt anything at all. 

**To Unknown:** _Gtg. Avengers._

He turned the phone off and tossed it onto his dresser without another thought. Fuck Phil and fuck himself. Fuck Phil for asking, and himself for texting in the first place. Clint still didn’t know why he’d done it, he’d just _done it_.

Or, maybe he did know why.

Phil was alive. That was why.

\----

He dreamt of a coffin.

He dreamt he was standing under a tree in the rain, watching a group of pallbearers carry the dark, wooden death box toward a bottomless hole in the ground.

None of the people marching down the aisle with the box on their backs was anyone important. They were faceless. None of them mattered. Not one of them knew whose body it was they were responsible for in those moments that seemed to last a lifetime, like a slow-motion march toward the end. The end, the end, the end.

He dreamt of Pepper crying.

She was standing with the group of mourners, a mass of black suits and black umbrellas. One of them had glossy brown hair, playing a cello and singing soft words he couldn’t make out.

He wasn’t standing with them. He wasn’t allowed.

He was standing under a tree, watching people he didn’t know carry the thing that had meant more to him than his own soul to its final destination.

He dreamt of the coffin lid opening. Slowly. Silently. A body in black with his face half-melted with rot, sitting up. Its right eye dripping down from the socket, and the sound of a neck cracking as it turned toward the tree.

It held out an arm, pointing a finger right at him.

“ _You._ ”

\----

Clint sat up in a rush as he woke, panting, sweat soaking through the collar of his shirt.

In reality, he’d been one of the pole bearers at that funeral, underneath the front, right-hand side of the heavy coffin. He’d watched it get lowered down. Tossed some dirt on the top. Watched Phil’s family cry, and a few SHIELD agents besides. Clint had been right in the thick of all of it, but he still couldn’t shake the dream-feeling of watching from a distance, nor the horror of seeing Phil’s dying face, being powerless.

He flailed about for the alarm clock on his nightstand, twisting until he nearly ripped it out of the wall socket before he could check the time. 2:02 AM. He set it down slowly – he’d broken too many of the stupid things to count, and he wouldn’t have time to pick up another before he left.

Wait. Before he left?

Huh. Clint wasn’t sure when he had decided he was going, but the thought was already stuck in his mind like all his probably-bad ideas were. Then his phone was in his hand before he could think to set it down and work through the situation with any kind of sensible rationale, and that was pretty much it, wasn’t it?

Tony picked up on the third ring.

“What the _fuck,_ Barton?”

“Shut up, I know you weren’t sleeping.”

He could hear a crashing sound and a small explosion, then the distant sound of a fire extinguisher going off before Tony responded. “How could you know— Never mind,” he mumbled distractedly.

“It’s a day ending in _y_ ,” Clint answered anyway. “Hey Tony?”

“Yes, my least favorite, purple-suited sharpshooter?” Tony prompted, a touch aggressively in Clint’s opinion.

“I’m going to need to call in a favor.”

\----

Five hours later, he was greeted at his door by an angry young adult, dripping rain water onto the doormat with the bullet holes.

“Don’t tell me you walked all the way here. Not even you could be that dumb,” he parroted, deadpan.

Kate pushed past him with a deliberate shove to his bum shoulder.

“Ow!” he exclaimed accusingly.

“ _Be gone for a bit, no more than two days, get ready for flying crossbow targets when I get back,”_ she read off her phone. When she looked up she was glaring, one hand on her hip _,_ fingers tapping.

“I…I am sorry?” he tried.

Kate let out a frustrated noise, stomped over to the bow case on the floor, and sat down on it. “I could kill you, but then I wouldn’t get the chance to rub it in your face that I was so, totally right the whole time.”

“I wouldn’t say the whole time,” Clint grumbled. “This decision is a new development.”

She rolled her eyes and then got right back to the glaring. “It’s not new just because it took you a few hours to figure out. I told you I knew you were going.”

“Well at least I didn’t go without saying _._ ”

“You don’t get a prize for basic decency.”

“That’s a real impressive vocabulary you got there,” Clint teased, like an ass.

Kate made a frustrated noise and shot back up to her feet. If she thought he couldn’t tell she was placing herself in-between the nearest exit and himself, then she really needed to work on her subtlety. “You were really going to leave without me!”

“Katie, this is something—”

“I swear on the coffee maker, if you finish that with anything resembling, ‘ _I need to do this on my own_ ’, I will pitch the biggest fit you’ve ever seen. And I can do it with weapons.”

He was more than soft. He was defenseless marshmallow fluff in an unopened jar. Maybe he needed a SHIELD refresher course, after all. Clint couldn’t do anything but sigh as Kate’s hands went to her hips.

“Fine, but we do this my way,” he relented, the words not even halfway out of his mouth before she was smirking. “You’re strictly running backup, you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. This is your op, whatever. Just tell me that’s not what you’re going to wear.”

He looked down at his purple t-shirt and jeans, the ones _without_ a hole in them, thank you. “What’s wrong with this? I wear it every day?” No matter that this wasn’t what he was going to wear, it was the principle of the thing.

“Nothing. If we’re going to a dive bar.”

“Funny you should mention that…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam goes to therapy like a balanced human instead of dealing with his baggage through disassociation and anger displacement, but sure, sure Clint, he’s the weirdo.
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you so much for the kudos/feedback, it really means a lot and I appreciate you all <3


	3. Chapter 3

CLINT

Some ops were more like cons than others. The fake identity, general amount of manipulation, and lying out of one’s ass for extended periods of time to get the intel/passcode/object/etc from the target tended to blur the lines on certain missions. It was safe to say that the majority of top SHIELD agents would have made damn good con artists in another life.

Clint could roll with the punches just fine, better than most, but he wasn’t usually the one picked for the con ops back in the good old days. That was usually left up to Natasha, or Phil if the situation required a male appearance. And Clint had preferred it that way, truth be told.

But you weren’t a SHIELD agent if your plans didn’t go belly up once in a while, even for Strike Team Delta. So, Clint knew damn well how to work a room. As a matter of fact, he also knew damn well how to work a piano in a jazz bar in New Orleans.

“No way,” Kate deadpanned. They were casing the venue from a rooftop two blocks away.

Clint shrugged, eyes trained on the back door of the lot through the binoculars. “Yes way.”

“You couldn’t have just, I don’t know, gone for the bartending gig? That seems so much simpler.”

“Funny enough, Stark asked the same question.”

He could practically hear the face she was making. “I don’t think I want to be lumped in with the likes of Tony Stark.”

“You wanted to come on this mission, you don’t get to make judge-y faces about my methods.”

“Your methods are wacko.”

“Roundabout,” he conceded. “That’s all a part of the plan.”

“It’s comforting that you think a plan is happening here. Are we really sure Coulson’s secret team is keyed into your guy Moreau?”

Clint didn’t fidget, but his fingers itched for his bow. “If they’re not, we’re still helping a guy out. And helping the city, too, since Moreau clearly has no idea how to control whatever he’s developed that’s causing the spontaneous combustion.”

“And we can always drop him somewhere obvious and convenient for secret-SHIELD to pick him up if you’re wrong about SHIELD being able to follow the bread crumbs?”

“There is that,” he agreed.

She sighed heavily. “Your brand of flirting is exhausting.”

Clint didn’t flinch, but it was a near thing.

“Call it making up for lost time…” Clint mumbled sarcastically, catching sight of Moreau rounding the corner at last. “That’s my cue.” Clint shucked off the binoculars and started shrugging on the dark blue button up and dinner jacket while Kate took over the lookout. He managed to get properly dressed (or close enough to it) only grumbling a minimal amount, and Kate only rolled her eyes heavenward once, so clearly, he was getting better at this penguin-suit stuff.

“Same signal?” she asked, giving him a last-minute once-over. Clint assumed he passed muster, since she didn’t get up to fix anything on him. He wasn’t going to ask if he looked okay, because that would have made him feel stupider than he already did.

“How do I look?” Aw, mouth. So much stupider.

“You’ll do. It’s dark in jazz clubs, so I’m sure no one will notice the bullet hole as long as you keep the jacket closed.”

He looked down and yep, there _was_ a bullet hole through the left side of the shirt. At least the small knife tears from that last mission with Nat were more easily hidden at the back. Buttoning up the jacket, he trotted back over to drop a kiss on the top of Kate’s head. She swatted at him blindly, mumbling under her breath. It was a loving swat though. Totally.

“Aim for the calves if things get rowdy,” he reminded her.

“Did you pack those pretty shock arrows?”

Clint smirked. “Who do you take me for?” he teased, and then jumped.

\----

Phil loved jazz.

Clint had learned that in stages, first with little hints like the songs he’d played on an op or just driving around in Lola, and then in big, neon signs when he stepped foot into Phil’s apartment for the first time and was faced with a cabinet full of vinyl records. The hesitation in Phil’s voice when Clint pointed to them, the way that his jazz collection was second only to his Captain America memorabilia, or the small smile on his face when Clint said it was cool and meant it.

Clint had always appreciated jazz, in that way that he appreciated anything well made that took skill and some level of inherent talent. He could play the piano, too, so he knew a bit of what it took to put some feeling into the noise. But in truth, he’d only ever seen it as a way to get to what he was really good at: shooting. He wasn’t dubbed an Olympic-level athlete for nothing, after all, the piano was more of a means to an end than something he was proud of.

Of course, like most things in Clint’s life, that perspective was rapidly turned on its head when he least expected. He hadn’t thought about it in years, but on this op, it was all coming back to him.

He forced the memories out of his focus. All he had to do was wait.

Well, wait and play the piano to the lead’s terrible taste in jazz. The people calling out their favorites weren’t any better, but hey, the place didn’t smell like week-old piss and vomit, so it was better than some of the places Clint used to busk in the bad-old-days.

“I can’t get my scope on him from the window,” Kate’s quiet voice pipped in though the mini comm in his ear.

“Far left corner. Down my line of sight,” Clint murmured back, using the crescendo as a cover. He shot the table of bridesmaids a wink for good measure, and they burst into hysterical laughter and poked each other hard enough that the one on the right toppled right off her chair.

Moreau was huddled in the corner, his back against the wall in a way that had him facing the rest of the room, close to an exit. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the stage in the half-hour since Clint had taken his place, and every so often Clint would see the man’s fingers dancing across his folded arms like he was playing along.

Even in the dim light of the club, he looked like a man haunted by longing.

If anyone could help this guy, it would be Phil. He had a knack for the lost-causes. Clint should know.

And as long as the place didn’t go up in flames, Clint was confident he could get him to Phil. He just hoped Phil would take the bait as easily as Moreau had.

Finish the set, show off a little, strike up a conversation with the target, and remember not to spook the fire-starter when telling him that Hydra is after him. Easy-peasy.

Only it wasn’t Phil who walked into the club with one song left.

Melinda May wore a slinky black dress and sat down in the only empty booth left. It was a way’s away from the stage, but close enough that the cold look she was giving him made his balls head north for Canada. He was half way through the thought of, ­ _what is the Cavalry doing in New Orleans_ , before the clear answer struck him in the face.

If Clint was Phil and had to build a team of people that would not only be unsuspected, but people who he could trust, Melinda May would be his top pick. Though it must have been a hell of an elevator pitch to convince her to come back to field duty.

The woman was a legend. The first time she addressed Clint in person, Clint had nearly bitten his tongue clean off, stumbling over his words at a break-neck pace.

He was absolutely not jealous Phil was working with her these days. That would be stupid.

And then they were playing “In a Sentimental Mood”, and Moreau looked closer to crying than anything else. Clint put on his show, showing a soft smile and enjoying the cooing from the ladies at the front maybe a little more than he should have; given that Hydra was coming to kill or capture a man, and Melinda May was giving him her trademark death glare from the far corner.

But something felt off.

He swayed and teased the keys with just a little more flare than the song needed, he found his groove without having to try too hard, and yet…he had that slowly creeping feeling of being watched by something he couldn’t see. Trusting that feeling had become his lifeline by age five, and then he’d turned it into a job skill when he was recruited by SHIELD – he knew better than to shrug it off.

Then the sax played out and it was just him and the drum beat. The soft, dream-like music had affected the room, too, leaving them all but silent as he played.

They finished to applause and Clint spun around on the bench, earning a wolf-whistle when he blew a kiss to the crowd and hopped off the stage before anyone could stop him.

Melinda was not-watching him across the room, but if she was here for the reasons Clint thought she was, then she wasn’t here to make idle chit-chat. That was just as good, because he had fuck all to say.

_Hi, glad you didn’t die of boredom sitting behind a desk all these years or get blown up during the Fall. And it’s cool that you’re not Hydra like more than half our friends and colleagues turned out to be. Come here often?_

He couldn’t see that going over well with the Cavalry.

Instead he sauntered over to the far end of the bar, ordered an easy drink, and made himself into the perfect picture of approachable bait. He hung back from the rest of the patrons, making sure to look as unintimidating as possible. If he knew jazz people, and he thought he had a decent grasp of the type, then Moreau would be coming in three…

“Haven’t seen you play here before.” Or sooner. That was cool, too.

Clint pulled a sheepish grin as he turned to face Moreau. The guy had his hands stuffed in his pockets and has dark circles that would rival Tony’s after a three-day stint in the bat cave. “Yeah, I’m new around these parts. Just filling in for Fred. He came into some money or something, I heard.”

More like Tony worked his genius-billionaire angle as a personal favor. Speaking of, this gamble had better pay off because Clint only had two of those things left.

“You looked like you were taking it easy on those keys right up until the end.”

“What can I say? You play the crowd pleasers for so long; your brain just learns to go with the flow.”

“A deep-cuts man, eh? Yeah, me too.”

Clint’s smile brightened. “You play?”

Moreau shrugged the shrug of a man who knew exactly how good he was but was attempting to look humble and only sort of pulling it off.  “It’s a hobby mor’n anything. But I dabble.”

Clint nodded appreciatively. “We’re about to start up another set, why not join us for a song or two? Show the new face how it’s done around here.”

Moreau’s face started to smile, then shattered. “No, I, uh. Thank for the…the offer but I…”

Clint held up a hand. “No problem. Say no more. I probably shouldn’t push a man I’ve only just met. Sometimes I just don’t know when to quit. The ladies at table three are a…an interesting enough bunch, anyway.”

That startled a laugh out of Moreau. He looked beyond rattled, but at least he wasn’t looking so wounded. “You really haven’t been doing the clubs ‘round here long if you aren’t used to bridal parties fawning all over the piano man.”

Clint chuckled, hiding his smile with the rim of his glass. Moreau seemed to loosen the tense line in his shoulders a bit. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Your accent isn’t from around here, neither.”

Clint gave a conciliatory head tilt. “Midwest. Iowa, if you can believe it.”

Moreau grinned, just a bit. “Blue eyes, dirty blonde hair, you look about the type. Family of farmers?”

Clint winced. “Caught me in one.”

“You don’t quite play like it.”

“Meet a lot of guys from Iowa farming families?”

“You’d be the first.” Moreau leaned against the bar, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, but somehow that didn’t stop the smolder.

Well, Clint could add Damn Smooth Flirt to Moreau’s file. He bet if Moreau wasn’t exhausted and half-terrified of setting the place on fire, he’d be even better.

Clint paused, considering. “You staying here long?” Moreau shrugged. “Stick around. Maybe show a guy how a New Orleans…” Two men in all black walk into the venue as Clint spoke. One quick look shows one visible holster on the first man, followed by obvious-as-fuck earpieces and suspicious bulges that have nothing to do with how happy they are to be in a jazz club.

Time for a new game plan.

He turned carefully, keeping his back against the bar and the two men in his peripheral while he looked back at Moreau. “I don’t think I need to ask you if you noticed Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones walk in here just now.”

Moreau blinked wildly, gaping for a split second before shutting his mouth. He looked like he was about to bolt, so Clint cup two fingers through the air beside his hip and shook his head slightly: a sign for May. “Keep talking to me, try not to move too quickly,” Clint said carefully.

“Who the fuck are you, man?”

“Name’s Clint. Have they been following you long?”

“I-I don’t know. Never noticed, been keeping a low profile. How did…how did they…who are they?” Moreau whispered frantically. “Who are you?!”

Clint smiled, and put up his hand slow enough to telegraph every motion to Moreau before putting his hand down on the guy’s shoulder. Moreau flinched, but no fire so far, so Clint counted it as a win. “Ever heard of an organization named Hydra?”

He blinked. “The fucking Nazis? What do _Nazis_ want with me? You’re one of them?”

His arms were shaking, and Clint didn’t have to look down to see the wisps of smoke coming from the pockets as Moreau’s arms started to shake. Maybe the combustion wasn’t so spontaneous, after all. Well, thank god for small mercies.

Clint spoke quickly, squeezing Moreau shoulder and ushering him back, heading toward the door for the area behind the bar, where the kitchens were. “I’m not. But I’m betting they found you the same way I did. And if my team was able to find you, then you can bet there’s more people out there that are gunning for you, too. Like you said – they’re Nazi fucks, or not far from it. Dangerous doesn’t begin to describe them. I know we don’t know each other – and you could probably do a number on me with those hands of yours – but I promise you, I can get you out of here and somewhere safe.”

“You’re real fucking calm for the situation, man. You do this shit all day?”

“Used to. But I’m usually more of a long-range kinda guy.”

They were spotted.

“Down!” Clint ordered, shielding Moreau with his body in the doorway, even as Moreau dove behind the wall. His bow was in the kitchen, all he had to do was get to it. Easy-peasy.

“Fuck!” Moreau shouted, and Clint distinctly smelt something burning.

“Buddy, not saying I can’t do it, but me getting you out of here is gonna be a bit more challenging with the place on fire.”

“I’m sorry!”

They had maybe seven seconds before the guys in suits were on them. “Everybody out!” Clint shouted at the kitchen staff. There was screaming and the _whoosh_ and then _fizzle_ of fire behind him as the back door swung open and the staff stumbled out. 

Clint used his last second to see Moreau with his hands shoved in a pot of what looked like burnt soup. _Nice._

There was something to be said for the feeling of giving into muscle memory. Disarming the first guy, ducking down, tossing him over his back in time to take the punch from the second, watching the third vault over him, racing toward where Moreau was probably doing a great impression of a deer in headlights.

He used the pistol he’d taken, twisting it around in his hand the way Nat had taught him years ago, and slammed the blunt end into the second guy’s head.

Hydra men, though – heads made of fucking _steel_. The guy stumbled and blinked rapidly, but still charged forward, bent at the waist to catch Clint around the middle.

Clint might have even grinned. He’d missed the feeling, okay? It wasn’t that weird in his line of work to get hooked on the adrenaline.

He let threw the gun as hard as he could at the back of Number Three’s head, and let himself get caught in the tackle, allowing the momentum to carry them into the counter, briefly praying they still had some Icy-Hot stashed somewhere in the cockpit as the hard edge hit him square in the lower back.

Slamming one heel down on the guy’s knee, he lifted himself up enough to shove a knee between their chests and kick out as hard as he could. The guy lost his grip and stumbled back, dazedly pulling a knife from his boot. Clint’s feet hit the ground and he grabbed for the wrist holding the knife, yanking it forward, then wrapping an arm around the guy’s neck and swinging his body up with his legs, pulling the guy to the floor and landing hard on his own back.

He doubted any of that had looked as graceful as the way Natasha did it, but he’d gotten the job done. Clint wrapped his legs around the goon’s, keeping them restrained, and held his arm tight around the neck until he felt the struggling stop.

Gasping, he released the hold and rolled back up to his knees.

“They’ve barricaded the doors from the outside, looks like they’re calling in reinforcements,” Kate informed him.

Clint spat out blood and looked for Number Three, but all he saw was Moreau with a dented pot in his hand. “You got him?” Clint asked.

“ _In the kitchen!_ ” They heard someone yell from the bar, and Clint saw the metal start to glow hot in Moreau’s hand.

A new goon burst through the door, barking out, “I have him!”, while Kate _whooped_ in his ear. “Hawkeye, more are on their way to you,” she said. No shit, he didn’t say. “I got two headed up to me, you’re gonna need a new plan.”

New plan. Okay.

“My bow! Alleyway!” Clint grunted, ducking just in time to miss the big guy’s right hook.

Trusting Moreau would listen, he took the second punch to the gut and went to the floor. He felt the tip of his bow brush up against his fingers a second later and he had just enough time to grab and swing it up at the thick skull of his attacker. The man collapsed, smacking the other side of his head into the hard steel edge of the sink.

 _Think, think!_ He needed a better diversion than the chaos in the main room. Needed something loud.

Duh, _Moreau_.

He hoped Tony had his checkbook ready.

“Get ready,” Clint shouted as he aimed and shot at the run off bucket of grease and oil near the stove. It spilled toward the grate in the floor, closer to the doorway.

“What do I do?!”

“Boom!” He shouted, running to shove back over the prone bodies to the other side of the metal island.

“Move and we shoot!” Came a shout from the main hall, barely heard beyond the screaming. He had just enough time to glace back and see the barrel of the gun pointed at him before Moreau threw out his hands and the oil took to the flames

Clint threw himself at Moreau to push him through the metal door, but the second they fell out into the alley; another group of thugs reloaded their guns, walking towards them from the street.

“Three against one?” Clint observed lightly, palming two arrows as he got back up to his feet. “You boys know how to throw a party.”

“Fuck off, asswipe,” the middle one snarled. It was always the middle guy.

Clint kicked back, knocking Moreau to the ground and causing two arcs of fire to shoot out above his head, singeing the back of Clint’s neck. The thugs fired wildly, one diving to get out of the way of fire they hadn’t seen coming. It was enough time for Clint to notch his arrows, then two of them were down in an instant, bodies jerking from the volt of electricity that shot through them on impact.

The third guy stumbled back into the light, firing at him as he dodged, rolling and palming another arrow, but he didn’t get the chance to use it.

Another arrow shot through the air from the rooftop to Clint’s right, hitting its target with a sound that echoed through the alley. The thug yelled in pain and got another wild bullet out, ricocheting off the brick wall and nicking Clint’s forearm, before he fell face first onto the pavement, the arrow lodged into his back. It was yellow tipped – a sleep dart.

Clint tapped the comm in his ear. “Nice shot, Hawkeye!” 

“Not so bad yourself, Hawkeye. The two-for-one special?”

“Well,” he conceded, turning back around to face the mound of garbage bags that was blazing a bit too brightly to be pegged as a normal cigarette fire, “two for two. It’s dark, cut a man some slack. Hey, think you can get a fire department or something down here? I remember something about kitchen fires being bad.”

“What do I look like, your handler?” Kate snarked back, but he knew she would. She was responsible like that; had good manners. She’d been to _cotillion_ after all.

“I’ll support you in whichever path you choose in life.”

“I hate you,” she deadpanned.

He smirked and tapped the comm again to turn outgoing chatter off.

“Moreau?” he called out.

Moreau was shaking, fire still dripping from his hands like water. “I-I-I…holy shit.”

Clint nodded and grinned sympathetically. “Yeah. That’s reasonable.” He approached the man slowly, slinging the bow over his back and keeping his hands in plain sight.

“Are they dead?”

“No. Medical attention is on the way. Trust me, I’d rather they rot in jail.”

“I didn’t really take you seriously, when you said you could get me out of there. Those guys were _brick_ fucking _walls_.”

Clint winked. “I’ve been known to scale walls much bigger than the likes of them. You doing okay?”

“Don’t…don’t come too close,” Moreau warned, frantically looking between his hands, the garbage fire, and Clint. “I don’t want to…fuck, man. I don’t know how to shut these things off!”

“It’s okay,” Clint said calmly. “I hang around gods and other people with powers way scarier than you. My buddy Strange has a sentient cape as a pet. Except if you call it a pet to its face – or its pleats, I guess – it slaps you. Imagine being slapped by a sentient cape. That’s pretty fucking terrifying. Not to mention the dude tends to open up portals out of nowhere just to fuck with people. It’s worse around me ‘cause he doesn’t like me much. He’s kind of an asshole, honestly.”

“You hang around…what? Superheroes? Man, who are you? I’ve never heard of a superhero named Clint.”

Clint’s hands fell to his sides and his mouth absolutely did not form a pout. “Seriously? Bow? Arrows? Kickass secret agent skills? My docs got leaked to like, everywhere a couple months ago. You’re telling me the New Orleans Jazz scene doesn’t know about me?”

“Sorry, man, I don’t follow the news much. Got a few issues of my own. Like fire hands.”

“Oh, he’s got jokes! See? Everything’s fine if you can joke. That’s pretty much how I know I’m not dead yet.” Clint was now standing right by Moreau side, careful to not step in the fire. “My buddy Tony – my real buddy, not the Doctor Strange kind of buddy – he got blown back through a space hole and crashed down to earth first time we went out as a team. He was cracking jokes the second he started breathing again.”

Moreau gaped at him. “Is this supposed to calm me down? Because, seriously, it sounds you’ve just got some fucked up friends.”

“I’ve also got some friends that know a hell of a lot more than I do about people with special abilities. They can help, if you want that. Because, honestly man, what happened tonight is small scale. There are more organizations than there are letters in the alphabet that want to get their hands on many people with abilities as they can; regardless of who they hurt.”

“These friends…they don’t happen to be named Tony, or have sentient capes, do they?”

“Hell no. These ones are way better adjusted, or so I’m lead to believe.”

“Coming from you, I’m not sure that makes me feel better.” The fire had stopped, but Clint wasn’t sure Moreau had noticed.

“I get that.” Clint held out a hand, and Moreau just sort of blinked at it for a moment. “You might have fire-proof skin, but I’m not loving the smell of burning rubber. Maybe we take this talk away from the stuff that’s burning through your shoes?”

Moreau took his hand in a very bro-y clapping sort of way that would have had Kate’s eyes rolling into the back of her head, but it meant he was accepting Clint’s help, so it was a win.

Clint led him out of the mess and tried to keep the bodies out of Moreau’s line of sight for as long as he could. “What say we find the people who are more qualified than me?” Clint joked, ginning right up until he was in range of the chatter from the street.

It was almost comical how quickly his world shifted, after picking up just three little words. It wouldn’t have been possible without the Stark tech in his ear, helping him hear better than he could ever remember, even before the years of hearing damage caught up with him.

Just three overheard words, and suddenly everything changed.

“Nice work, Daisy.”

\----

PHIL

The crux of the issue was that he had a feeling he knew what was going on from the start; from the very second Daisy tells him she’s picked up on an anonymous tip, hidden in plain sight, Phil knows what’s happening. He wondered briefly who it was that posted it, but there were really only two options, and considering the context and language of the tip – namely that it was discovered on 4chan – the most likely suspect would be Stark. That was the sort of detail Phil could imagine Clint and Phil finding hilarious, but that Natasha would deem juvenile.

He was vindicated when he got a call to the burner phone that two people on the planet had the right number for, and he knew the number Clint called him from by heart, so it had to be Natasha.

“Tell him I understand,” was all she said before hanging up. When he tried to call back, the number was disconnected.

So, yes, Phil knew what was going on by the time he read through the anonymous tip Daisy pushed in his direction. Then, naturally it wasn’t long before Melinda knew what was going on, too. Not because she ever knew Clint well, but because she knew _Phil_ , and maybe Phil’s tells were a little more noticeable than usual on that particular day. But that should be excused entirely, because Phil _knows_ , and it’s all he can do to not pull out his phone and break all of the careful rules he’d built for himself.

The others didn’t know it like Phil and Melinda did. They didn’t know the importance of this op, or the reason for the sudden weight on Phil’s shoulders.

Phil could tell Daisy had picked up on his tells, too, but he also knew she didn’t have the necessary context to decipher what they mean, other than he was on edge and something was not right. Even Mac was on edge by the time they rolled out, looking at Phil a little too carefully as Phil briefed the team on the plan for the extraction of a possible Inhuman in New Orleans. FitzSimmons were being watchful as well, but their own projects were taking enough of their focus that neither of them asked too many questions, though he could see them ready on Jemma’s lips. For the first time, he was selfishly grateful everyone was too overworked to pester in the limited amount of time they had.

That didn’t stop the team from sharing a _look_ , however.

It was supposed to be a simple extraction, with minimal chance of firefight. Daisy and Mac were purely B-team, and that was out of the ordinary enough to make everyone in the room look at each other again, but Melinda smoothed it over with a smirk and a, “Like old times, huh?” Then there was a tangent about the _old times_ and that took some of the pressure off for a few moments. It wasn’t enough to keep the _looks_ from happening, but it was enough to keep people from openly questioning Phil’s behavior for the time being.

Daisy looked like she was practically buzzing throughout the briefing, so it was anyone’s guess how long it would take her to crack. Phil was betting she’d break down and corner him the second the briefing was over, which was exactly why Phil assigned them all specific tasks (as far from his office as he could get away with) and called Melinda to his office immediately.

“You know what I’m going to ask,” was all Melinda said as Phil changed into his field suit (which wasn’t that much different than what he’d been wearing before, aside from the tactical vest he slipped on underneath, but it had the tie the same color that always seemed to catch Clint’s eye before, and Phil was determined to take any advantage he could get).

“No, I am not compromised. Yes, I will let you know when I am.” There really wasn’t a point in using an _if_ statement there. He would only be lying to himself as well as Melinda if he tried to pretend that he thought this mission wasn’t going to go to hell the second he and Clint were in the same room at the same time, both conscious, for the first time in years.

She nodded once. “There is no way I’m agreeing to let you run the show out there in the field.”

He sighed, straightening his cuffs. “To be completely honest, I wasn’t going to ask you to. We’ll stick to the plan. You’ll be the only one visible to both him and the target.”

Now _she_ was giving him a look. “Until when? Because I’m also not going to let you stick to the shadows until he’s out of range. We’ve risked too much, and _you_ have risked too much, to let this childish game of hide and seek go on any longer.”

Phil knew she was right. Even if he could have watched from the wings on this one, just catching glimpses and snippets of Clint’s voice, he wouldn’t have suggested it. But the point is moot, because he hasn’t been this close to Clint Barton in over three years, purposefully. He’d been so careful about making sure he wouldn’t bump into any of them, and it had worked so well up until it hadn’t. Or, maybe it had never worked well, and Phil was kidding himself.

He was probably kidding himself about a lot of things.

The one thing he knew though, the one thing he was certain of, is that Clint Barton had set up a solo extraction (plus or minus the Black Widow, and didn’t _that_ drive up his anxiety levels). He might not know why, or when it was decided, or what he would be facing when he looked into Clint’s eyes, but he did know Clint had been the one to put the pieces in motion.

Albeit, he’d put them into motion without giving Phil anything even slightly resembling a warning, and had still yet to text Phil back, but that was superfluous information. If this had been anyone else on the planet, Phil might have worried about that, maybe reconsidered the mental state of that person, but this was Clint. Clint did a lot of things that he probably wouldn’t have if he’d done any objective thinking at all, but that just wasn’t his style. He went with his gut, and followed his impulses wherever they led him.

It was how Clint had gotten Natasha on their side, and how he’d saved Phil’s life more times than anyone could count.

The ‘how’ of it all didn’t matter. It was the result that counted, and the result was that Clint had set up a scenario in which they would be in the same place at the same time, for however long. He’d thrown himself from the rooftop.

If Clint was willing to do that, Phil would give as much as he could in return.

Melinda nodded, whether it was to herself or for his benefit, Phil wasn’t sure. “I’m heading back to the cockpit. We should be touching down in twenty.”

“Don’t forget to change into something swanky,” Phil called out as she was leaving. Her laugh was worth the pain of forcing words past the lump in his throat.

\----

Naturally, because this was a Tuesday and nothing good lasted long for Phil on Tuesdays, the plan was a moot point almost immediately. “There’s a sniper,” Mac informed over the comms, cool and collected as ever. That was good.

Phil had snuck into the security room of the jazz club, little more than security closet with two monitors and a computer that might be pushing Phil’s age, and watched the slight delay in the footage as Daisy came into view and pulled the fallen body from the line of sight. “I.D.?” Phil asked.

Daisy took a moment to search the body before answering. “Um…two guns. A knife. Cell phone. Earpiece. Ah! Yes, it’s a fake driver’s license with a about a hundred in cash in the wallet. Checking the phone now.” In no more than a minute, Daisy had hacked in and found all his recent calls and texts routing from a blocked number.

“So, we thinking Hydra picked up this guy’s trace too?” Mac asked.

“Likely,” Phil decided. He was doing his level best not to focus in on the head of blonde hair he could only just make out in the corner of the second monitor, where the stage was. He hadn’t gotten a face, but he didn’t need one. He would have known Clint anywhere, and a grainy, black and white security feed wasn’t enough of a challenge at all.

It didn’t help that every so often the group of women positioned in front of the piano would swoon every so often. One went so far as to, quite literally, fall from her chair when her friend poked her in the side as they giggled. The glimpses of hands flourishing off the keys weren’t doing Phil any good, either.

He was more than glad that the security cameras didn’t cover audio feeds. Phil wasn’t sure he could take Clint playing jazz as the first thing he heard from the man in person. He was also fairly certain that Clint knew it, and this was a part of his scheme in the first place.

But he could see Melinda easily, she was sitting in a booth up against the left wall, facing the camera. He could also tell she was staring directly at Clint, and though he couldn’t make out her expression, he could guess.

Poor Clint.

It was less of a surprise when things went to hell, all things considered.

“Target on the move. Far end of the bar,” Melinda murmured.

“I have visual,” Phil answered. And oh, did he ever. He watched Clint _saunter_ up to the bar, easy gestures and causal posture as he sidled up to the target and began a conversation.

“Two men in suits just entered the club,” Daisy informed them.

“Trained,” Melinda added shortly after. “They’re searching for something.”

“Any octopus tattoos,” Mac said dryly.

“Hilarious. Agent May, take care of them before they get too close. The last thing we want is a spooked Inhuman in a room that crowded. Daisy, Mac, ready the exit strategy.”

“More on the way in,” Mac said, sounding out of breath. “They brought out the whole damn squad for this guy. Daisy and I have our hands full for the moment. May, can you give us some time?”

“They’ve been spotted.”

Phil didn’t curse outwardly, but the internal blue streak was at the ready. “Work on getting civilians out, we’ll have to trust that he’s got Moreau handled.”

“ _Who_ has him handled?” Daisy asked, but a harsh knock on the door kept Phil from having to answer.

“Open up!”

“Showtime,” Phil muttered. Then again, what better way to ease his anxiety than a little physical confrontation?

\----

CLINT

As many times as he’s imagined the way seeing Phil Coulson in person would make him feel – the anger, the resentment, the jealousy, the joy, the longing, the _ache­ –_ Clint wasn’t even close to being prepared for the real thing.

He had been running through a constant stream of, _why not me,_ from the minute he’d woken up in the hospital bed and understood that what he had seen had all been real, but even the anger at being deliberately left behind, out of Phil’s life, wasn’t enough to mask the incredible feeling of _thank god he’s alive._

It was likely that nothing would ever be enough to drown that out – not even if Phil literally stabbed him in the back, killing Clint with a smile on his face, and yes, Clint had had that dream. He could be bleeding out on the floor, and his last feeling would be sheer gratitude that Phil was even there to stab him in the first place. The moment he heard Phil’s voice, Clint knew that more than ever.

Still. No matter how many times Clint had played this situation over in his head, not a single one of those possibilities could hold a candle to the way he felt when he heard the words: “Nice work Daisy.”

They ran through his head, over and over, until it was all he could think, until he felt his chest constricting in and in and in, with no sign of stopping.

_Nice work, Daisy._

Nice work?

He could vaguely hear Kate chattering in his ear again, but her words were little more than annoying white noise, and he tore out his ear piece without a second thought.

He knew that voice. He hadn’t heard it in person in years, but he _knew_ it.

“Uh. Clint?”

Fuck. Moreau. Right. Clint blinked, clearing his throat in an attempt to regain composure and failing utterly. “Feel like meeting your knights in shining Kevlar?”

Moreau still looked shell-shocked. Clint knew the feeling. “They’re here already?” Moreau asked, peering over Clint’s shoulder with wide eyes. “Damn, you people work fast.”

Clint might have had a better quip than, “Yeah, pretty much”, if he’d been able to think of anything other than the words, _nice work, Daisy._

He led Moreau down the alley way, guarding him carefully with his bow at the ready, just in case. He knew jack shit about Phil’s new team, and he didn’t trust that they’d gotten all the goons on their end. Moreau was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, his teeth chattering in his mouth, so Clint put a hand on his arm as he pulled him toward the voices.

“Stay inside, yes, everything’s fine, just let our boys in blue clean up out here, alright? Someone will be inside to talk to the witnesses soon, so just hang tight,” said a deep voice from over near the entrance. It wasn’t even close to the voice he wanted to hear, though. He suddenly resented his hearing loss the way he hadn’t in years, wishing he could just get a little more, just a hint at where Phil’s voice had come from…  

“Cops got a lot of you men-in-black types on retainer?” Moreau hedged, seemingly in an attempt to not come off as scared shitless as he really was. Didn’t work too well, since Clint could feel the pulse at his wrist pumping for dear life.

“More like SHIELD has a few cops on retainer,” Clint told him quietly. “Or, they used to. Not so sure about how all that works now. The whole, _half of our organization are actually Nazis,_ really stuck a wrench in my worldview.” He knew he was rambling, but he couldn’t help it. He scanned the street, looking for signs of a familiar face. Maybe for one in particular, but he’d settle for May, if only to get Moreau to someone who knew how to help him.  

She found them before Clint could spot her, because of god-damn-course she did.

“Agent Barton,” Melinda May called out, gun held ready at her side as she came around from behind the club. “You left a mess.”

The smile he shot her wasn’t even all that fake, but he was still twitchy, looking around everywhere he could. He’d heard Phil’s voice for fuck’s sake, how far away could he have gotten in the few minutes since?

“I think I found the right woman for you,” he told Moreau.

“Oh my god,” Moreau muttered. Clint looked back at him and tried not to smirk. Melinda May had a similar effect on people most days, but with the gun in her hands and her game-face on, she was something else entirely.

“Don’t worry. She has that effect on everyone. She won’t actually kill you, though.”

“Charming,” May said dryly. But, she holstered her gun without shooting him, so Clint counted it as another win, and swung his bow back over his shoulder. “Melinda May,” she greeted Moreau, professional as ever. “I take it you’re the reason for the fire fight?”

Moreau looked like he was about to bolt, so Clint pated his back the way Steve sometimes did to reassure people. Given the way Moreau jolted, it might not have had the same effect.

“Uh, yeah,” Moreau said. “Name’s Francis. Francis Moreau. Clint – Hawkeye – says you’re the ones who can…fix this?” He held up his hands, gesturing vaguely.

“We can help, if that’s what you mean. You aren’t as alone as you might have thought.” She tapped her earpiece, keeping an eye on them but looking far less threatening. At least Clint thought so, Moreau seemed a little frozen. Heh. A fire-guy, frozen. “I’ve found them, but Daisy, we might need your help,” May said. She turned back to look Moreau in the eye, and Clint’s hand on his back kept him from taking a step backward. “Daisy has abilities, too. She knows a thing or two about waking up and suddenly having no idea how to control herself. Ringing any bells?”

“You could say that…”

Clint heard the sound Phil’s voice again before he processed whatever May began telling Moreau next. Then he heard movement coming from the other side of the building and he turned on his heel so fast he nearly fell over himself.

The wind was knocked out of him the moment he looked up, like he’d gotten sucker punched by Thor.

Phil was walking beside a smaller girl with short, wavy, brown hair. But Phil. He had a tailor-made suit that didn’t have so much as a speck of dust, like he’d popped right out of a memory. One corner of his lips was tilted up in the barest hint of a smile, eyes bright and open, even in the dimly lit street, and Clint’s brain promptly short circuited.

“Oh, holy…is that _Hawkeye_?” the girl practically shrieked, but Clint didn’t so much as blink, unable to look away from the way Phil’s eyes snapped forward.

The air sucked into Clint’s lungs felt like fire down this throat, and then he was moving before anyone could do anything. It was nothing but static feedback in his brain and the image of Phil. _Phil._

He strode forward the seven steps it took to get to Phil and swung.

Clint’s fist connected, sharp enough to impact but without the follow through that would have really sent Phil staggering back. Clint pulled his punch the exact moment his body was blasted through the windowpane of the store he’d been standing in front of. The world spun, pain registered in spikes along his back, up to his neck and head, and all of a sudden, he was sitting up in a pile of broken glass.

He pulled the pistol back of out of his hip holster and it was in his hands, cocked at the ready when Phil shouted, “STOP! Stand down. Everyone, stand down! Daisy, Mac! Barton! Stand down!”

Clint lowered the weapon on an instinct he’d thought was long dead. He hadn’t instinctively followed an order like that in… he shook away the thought and spat blood from his split lip off to the side, jumping to his feet and crushing more glass underneath his boots.

“ _Barton_?” Clint said accusingly. He tried to sound scathing, but his voice was too winded and raspy to get the full effect. Someone had blasted him through a window, and now his opening line was ruined. _Fucking superpowers_.

“I’m so sorry!” She said to Clint, and, “He punched you!” to Phil before turning back to point at Clint. “You punched him!” The girl was frantically looking between Phil and Clint, apologizing as fast as she could.

“Barton?” Clint repeated, liking his tone a little better the second time around. Phil visibly flinched this time. Good. “That’s what I get: a fucking _Barton_?”

He hopped through the broken window, ignoring the pain in his back and head with practiced ease, not caring in the slightest about the cuts on his hands and elbows.

The second he looked at Phil, he wished he hadn’t. Phil looked nothing like the calm, cool, collected Agent Coulson. He looked _wrecked._ And the red splotch on his jaw wouldn’t bruise too much, but it was red enough that Clint wished he would have just left as soon as Moreau was safe.

Phil said nothing.

“You…know Hawkeye?” Daisy asked Phil carefully, standing a bit in front of him like she was ready to protect him from Clint with her own body. Cute. She must have been the one to blast him. Phil always had inspired strong loyalty in his people – and didn’t those memories sting like a bitch.

“I know a lot of people,” Phil said to her, but he was staring at Clint.

Clint couldn’t make his feet move anymore, so he just stood there in the middle of the sidewalk next to the broken widow, being stared at by a growing number of people. The man who’d been corralling club patrons earlier was jogging over, now, too.

“Well. The cops are here,” the man said simply. His voice was calm enough to surprise a snort out of Clint.

That seemed to break the trance-like spell Phil was under and he straightened his shoulders, face morphing back into something more like Agent Coulson, but…different. He gave orders to his people, May and Moreau included, but Clint wasn’t really listening to any of it. He was too busy watching the way Phil interacted with them, and his brain kept coming up with that word: different.

All of a sudden, everyone was quiet and back to staring at Clint. Oh. Someone had probably said something to him. He raised an eyebrow, keeping his face stoic, daring them to question his weird-ass behavior. He was hit with the feeling that this had all been a terrible fucking idea. The literal worst idea he could have come up with.

Then Kate shot an arrow at the ground near Daisy’s feet, and everything went to shit pretty quickly.

The panic set Moreau’s fire-hands off, and Clint instantly turned and got as close to the guy as he could, hands up where Moreau could see them in what he hoped was a placating gesture. “Hey, hey, hey, everything’s cool. That was my buddy, my other Hawkeye. Not Hydra or another Tommy Lee Jones. I swear, you’re safe.”

Melinda took a step toward Moreau and he flinched, arching a stream of fire toward her. Clint ran around to stand in between them, hands still in the air.

“Man, you’re bleeding!” Moreau whined. “They threw you through a window and you just took it! Now there’s multiple Hawkeyes?! And you want me to go with these people? You’re fucking crazy, I knew it!”

“Yeah, I am,” Clint conceded. “I’m batshit. I came in here to save your ass on a whim. A stupid, stupid fucking whim, I can admit that. But I pulled it off, didn’t I? The saving you part?”

He waited for a response and it took Moreau a second to catch on. “Uh. I guess?”

Clint’s mouth fell open and he let his hands fall. “You guess? You watched me take down five guys in a tiny kitchen without my bow, got you out, then took down three more guys with one shot!”

“Only two guys, jerk, _I_ got the last one,” Kate shouted down from her perch above them.

“Not now, Hawkeye!” Clint shouted over his shoulder. “See what I have to put up with? Training the next generation is a bunch of bullshit, I’m telling you.”

“What does that have to do with anything?!” Moreau exclaimed, waving his hands around on accident and inadvertently sending fire shooting out everywhere.

Clint slapped out the tiny lick fire that caught on his vest – which: ow, open cuts and fire don’t mix – and tried to act calm. “You’re already calming down compared to a few seconds ago, so my methods have to be doing something for you.”

“Shut up!”

“See? Yelling at me helps. Everyone does it.”

“He’s right, I do it all the time!” Kate yelled down again.

Clint rolled his eyes. “She’s a nightmare, but you won’t have to deal with her. You’ll be with SHIELD guys who know what they’re doing way better than we do, and I don’t use that phrase that lightly.”

“They, being the ones who threw you through a _window_?”

“If it makes a difference,” Daisy chimed in from somewhere behind him, “I didn’t throw him. I generated vibrations from my hands that pushed him through the window.”

 _Superpowers_ , Clint grumbled internally. But Moreau looked up at Daisy with a hesitant kind of wonder. “You’re Daisy?”

“The one and only!”

Clint smiled, half in relief that the fire was little more than smoke trailing from Moreau’s finger tips. “See? You don’t have to be an island, man. Who wants to play jazz to an empty room, anyhow? Wouldn’t it be better to show me up on stage in front of people who can agree with your awesome-ness? These guys can find a way to help you. It’s their thing, or so I’m led to believe.”

Moreau tore his eyes away from Daisy and looked at Clint, shaking his head. “I set you on fire multiple times tonight, man, and you’re not even flinching. You’re still a little on fire,” he pointed out, gesturing to Clint’s boot.  

Clint absolutely did not squeak, stomping on his own foot to stop the little flame from burning a hole through the leather. When it was out, he clapped a hand to Moreau’s arm again with a grin. “You have no idea how fucked up my life is, buddy. A little fire hazard ranks very low-level.”

“Are their lives…less fucked?” He whispered to Clint.

Clint paused to consider. “They don’t fight genetically modified pumpkin armies or literal goo monsters trying to engulf Manhattan, as far as I know. So sure, I’d say so.”

Moreau looked like he was trying to decide if Clint was fucking with him or not. He looked back over at the SHIELD team, while Clint did everything he could to _not_. “Okay. Okay, I’ll go. Just…if we ever see each other again, please don’t bring your guy Tony around. Or that cape. Or a goo monster. Sweet mother in heaven, I just said _goo monster_ seriously…”

“You get numb to it,” Clint told him honestly, and shook Moreau’s hand. “Good luck.”

“Yeah, you too. That guy you punched looks like he’s having some issues over there.”

Clint couldn’t _not_ look back after hearing that. Phil was staring at him like the rest of the world didn’t exist, eyebrows pinched and mouth twitching without any kind of pattern to it, and Clint felt the world slip out from under him all over again. He wanted to cry. Or punch something. Or run.

Before he could follow through on any of those, Kate dropped down from the fire escape, and May ushered Moreau over to Mac and Daisy.

Kate’s gentle hand on his arm jarred him out of his painful staring contest with Phil. “We came all this way, maybe go talk to him?” She looked over Clint’s shoulder, glaring at someone. “If they try to throw you through another window, though, I’m using the taser arrows.” Ah, probably Daisy, then.

Clint winced apologetically. “I threw away the comm.”

“No shit.” She was pulling one of those, _I want to be mad, but things are happening, so I can’t be,_ expressions. He hated those. They reminded him of the things that were happening. Not that he could really forget even if he wanted to. “I’ll yell at you later. After…whatever this is,” she sighed. “If you need me, call, okay? I’ll be in the jet.”

He almost asked her to stay. “Stay safe, Katie-Kate,” he whispered, low enough that no one around them could hear. He pulled her in quickly to drop a kiss on the top of her head, and if he closed his eyes a little too tight when he did it, no one could see it anyway.

Then she was walking away, leaving him out of stalling strategies. He clenched and unclenched his fingers, afraid that if he ran over to Phil like he wanted to, he’d grab on and never let go.

Which would have been insane, considering Phil had kept him in the dark for years, and while it was clear by now that he may have genuinely missed Clint, the confusing feelings rolling around in Clint’s chest couldn’t be the same ones rolling around in Phil’s.

So when he turned, only half-sure Phil would still be there, he did it slowly and deliberately. He rolled back his shoulders and put one foot in front of the other, relaxed. Maybe it looked more strained than relaxed, but his impulse control was always something that needed a little work.

Phil was still there, though, as if he hadn’t moved an inch. A tiny exhale left Clint’s mouth and it sounded like relief, but if it was, why didn’t it help?

Then, almost unconsciously, he was standing in front of Phil again, and Phil was waiting. His eyes were roaming over Clint, taking stock of the burns and nicks and probable bruises as if they were back in Strike Team Delta and Clint had just done something reckless. But this time, being looked after like that wasn’t comforting. It was nowhere close to feeling the same, because Phil’s face wasn’t so much a professional mask as it was a flimsy sheet blowing in the wind in front of a whole lot of emotions Clint didn’t know what to do with. Phil never looked like that. The Phil Clint knew never had.

“I’m-”

“I-”

They started at the same time, stopping at the same time, too. “You go,” Phil said.

Clint pursed his lips. Knowing he was scowling, but not knowing how to stop. Not knowing what he even wanted his face to do, really, but what else was new? “I’m going to apologize about the punch, but I still think you deserved it.”

“You wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t,” Phil said, matter-of-fact, like he _knew_ Clint. Like he had the right to. And, _fuck_ , Clint wished he did. “I can’t really apologize for Daisy’s response. I’m a little disappointed that her reaction time was that slow, actually, but I guess the shock of…this…ought to be taken into consideration.”

Clint opened his mouth, but no words came out. Was Phil writing up a mission report in his head right now? Because that sounded like he was evaluating an asset and oh, hello, _there_ was that anger he’d pushed aside to help Moreau.

“Barton?” Clint repeated for the third time. “Are you shitting me, _Coulson_?”

Phil’s lips thinned, the only deliberate sign of his discomfort. Clint used to love getting those small reactions out of him, it’d been like a challenge, a game. Now, it just pissed him off, and he felt a tug at his heart because it was another thing that was _different_.

“That was a poor choice of­—”

“Poor choice?! You want to talk about poor choices? Because calling me by my last name like we’re work colleagues, or in a fucking frat house – that’s not a poor choice. A poor choice would be wearing white after Labor Day. Barton? That’s an _insult_.” Clint was breathing heavy, close enough to Phil to smell the smoke from the club over his favorite brand of cologne, and every breath dragged that familiar scent too close to home. He took a quick step back, letting his face sink into hard lines as he crossed his arms over his chest and hoped Phil didn’t see it as the fear response that it so obviously was.

He used to be better at this.

Phil didn’t say a word for a long minute. “Clint,” and his voice broke on the word. Agent Phillip Coulson – legend of SHIELD – and his voice was breaking on one meaningless syllable. Phil recovered, though, clearing his throat and pushing his shoulders back, standing straighter, like it hadn’t happened. “We’re out in the open, attracting attention after a fight the police were not prepared for. Maybe we should take this conversation somewhere more secure.”

Clint knew he was right. When was Coulson ever wrong? And then that thought hit at his core like a bowling ball. He had to shut it down, or he was going to break, too. He’d be damned before he broke down in front of Phil. Not now, and not ever again if he could help it. But looking at Phil, feeling the phantom touch on his knuckles from where Clint had proven he was real and solid…that was a promise he knew he couldn’t keep. But it didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.

Clint nodded, one short jerk of his head. “We can’t use my ride, Hawkeye will be there.” He wasn’t going to kick her out, not when she’d come here just so Clint wouldn’t be alone.

Phil nodded in agreement, not missing a beat as Clint took off at a brisk pace. “The one in the purple jumpsuit?”

Clint grunted an affirmative. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Phil with Kate’s name, because despite everything, he didn’t for one second think Phil would betray her privacy, even if he didn’t know her. That was the kind of guy Phil was. But it was Kate’s decision who knew what about her, and she hadn’t given the go-ahead, so Clint wasn’t going to offer it up.  

“The Bus is actually in the other direction,” Phil said. “And that would be the most secure.”

“With your team lurking around the corner?” He wanted to feel more resentful towards them all, and sure, he was still a little bitter, but now they weren’t faceless entities he could blindly hate. So if he was going to be bitter toward anyone…

Swallowing the lump in his throat was just as painful as it was before.

“Yes,” Phil answered. “But they won’t barge in unless there’s an emergency. And my office is beyond the normal office standards for soundproofing.”

Clint spun on his heel, walking a half-step behind Phil without a word, but still keeping up the stomping of his feet. He needed to feel the impact. Feel that this was undeniably real, and he was in control of himself. His hand twitched, like it wanted to reach out and grab the one swinging by Phil’s side. He buried that feeling, too. “If they’re anything like I was, they’ll be spying on our conversation within minutes. With multiple recording devices to catch something juicy.”

Phil made a huffing sound that almost knocked Clint flat. He had to stop reacting that way to every sound out of Phil’s mouth, but making him laugh was just _not fair_. Way back when, he’d had to earn laughs from Phil, and Clint had cherished every one of them. It was a painstaking process that used to have Clint pulling out all the stops, making a complete ass of himself more often than not, but it was always worth it to break through Agent Coulson’s walls. Eventually the laughs came easier, showing up when Clint wasn’t even trying to be funny, and he’d cherished them all the same.

Clint kept those moments close to his heart, safe, where none of the horrible shit could touch them.

He was not going to break down, now. No chance.

They didn’t talk much on the walk over to whatever Phil meant by “The Bus”. Clint’s head was running through a weird mix of gratitude and wishing he could break the silence.

When they came to an empty lot, Clint immediately knew that SHIELD had spent a pretty penny on Stark-level cloaking devices, and he wondered if they’d given it to Phil’s team before or after the organization had gone up in smoke.

And then the cloaking devices shut off, and Clint abruptly lost all of his shit at once.

“A fucking GLOBEMASTER?!” he threw his hands up in the air and stormed up to the nearest part of the massive air craft. “A CXD 23 AMCS. Mother _fuckers_.” He ducked under to get a look at the wheels, seeing where they retracted into the hull, running his hands over the metal like it was precious, which it _was._ He jogged around to the front of the thing and laughed. “I knew Fury was keeping some of it hidden! That bastard. _Blown up_ , my lily-white ass cheeks.”

“It was one of my conditions,” Phil told him from a decent distance away. Clint might have tossed out his aide back in that alley, but he was surprised to find himself still tuned well enough to Phil’s facial expressions and vocal patterns that he caught the hidden smile in his voice.

Clint’s hand fell, stinging when the cuts on his palm grazed his pants. He had a pretty good idea what Phil meant, or he thought he did, and the awe and joy he’d felt at seeing the beautiful piece of machinery that was the Globemaster was sucked out of the air too soon.

“You’re going to tell me. All of it,” Clint said. His voice was low and even, and he wasn’t sure if he’d said it loud enough to hear, but then Phil nodded stiffly.

“Everything I know.”

\----

Clint couldn’t sit down – had only done it for the split second that it had taken Phil to say the words, “I died,” before he was up and pacing the room while Phil began his story. Phil told him so much that Clint’s head hurt almost as much as his heart did.

He didn’t interrupt, not one word, and he had the half-moon nail marks and re-opened cuts on his palms to prove it. Phil had offered to get him stuff to clean it up, but Clint had refused. As much as he had insisted that he wanted to get on with the answers, there was a larger part that was terrified of having Phil close enough to clean his cuts. To fix him up like he used to do… So, Clint had done a bit of macho posturing and scoffing, and Phil had let it go. That was another difference – he wouldn’t have let Clint win a health and safety battle, before.

Clint had frozen in place when Phil began explaining how Fury had brought him back. The aliens. The head. The goo. The literal torture they’d subjected Phil to, for days on end. Phil didn’t even remember all of it, but the general timetable he’d come up with put the duration at _weeks_. Dead and alive and dead again, over and over and over until something stuck. His heart had been cut in _half_ by Loki. He’d been dead. And now he was sitting in front of Clint.

Clint had snapped the pen he picked up when Phil got to the parts where he started remembering the lost time, when Phil would black out and wake up to find alien writing all over every surface imaginable. Phil had stopped talking to try and help Clint clean up the ink, but Clint had shaken his head.

“Keep going,” he’d told Phil, voice ragged from held-back screams of frustration and anger and pain on Phil’s behalf. Whether it was his tone or the words or the look in Clint’s eyes that convinced Phil he was better off continuing, Clint wasn’t sure. He had to go to that place in his head he retreated to in battle, and he took in every single word of it with firm resolve.

When Phil was finished, Clint stood silent in the middle of the room. Phil was behind his desk, hands clasped tightly in front of him. He’d told the whole thing clinically, like he was talking from a third person experience, and Clint couldn’t blame him. How else do you explain that kind of horror, that _violation_?

He wanted to hurl, but the rug looked too nice and he’d already gotten ink all over it.

“How…how are you…dealing?” Clint asked, at a total loss. He finally took his seat, gripping the arm rests enough to hurt the scrape in his forearm as well as his palms.

“If you can think of a healthy coping mechanism, feel free to let me know,” Phil said dryly.

Clint just stared. That was a joke. He knew it was, but he was suddenly full of a completely different kind of anger from the one he’d been harboring. He didn’t really have the right to be angry on Phil’s behalf, not anymore, and yet…

And yet Phil was _here_.

Clint nodded. And nodded again.

“We would have been there,” he said, finally. “I would have been there. Natasha would have been there. One word – just one – and I would have come running, no questions asked.”

It was a small consolation that Phil’s voice sounded just as frayed and wounded as Clint’s when he responded. “The world was an uncertain place to be. The world thought I was dead, and it needed me to stay that way. So much hinged on seven people not dropping off the face of the earth in the aftermath. The war was just beginning, and—”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Clint insisted. “The world is _still_ uncertain. It’s still shit. People are still insane and there are still more bad guys doing bad things than there are good guys trying to fix it, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. We do what we can to make it better anyway. This isn’t about the world. What do I care about that? You were dead. You were gone. Sure, the Avengers came together after that. Sure, we had a common thing to be pissed about. To _mourn_. And honestly, I can see you doing it to the Avengers, and I can see Fury doing to everyone with a use for him, but Nat and I? We weren’t the Avengers.”

“You are now.”

Clint stood up so fast the chair rocked backwards. He pointed a finger at Phil, yelling, “We were your people! You were _our_ family.”

Phil stood too, palms flat against the desk. “And you’re telling me you wouldn’t have done whatever it took to protect that?” He was shouting too, and Clint was shaking his head moving around the desk to get in Phil’s space. “Are you saying if you thought it would protect Natasha, you wouldn’t hide from her, too?”

It was all pain and rage in his chest, now. “What could you possibly be protecting us from?”

“From ME! I’m not the same Clint, and I was a danger and a liability. Melinda is here because she was ordered to take me out if I fell off the sanity wagon. This team is organized the way it is in order to keep me under control. Do you get that? They may have brought me back, but there’s no certainty in any part of this.”

Phil took a stiff breath in and out, then he gave one shake of his head. “You think I’d put the two of you in danger if I could help it?” he continued. “That I’d risk your safety for my own selfish desires? I wouldn’t. Not a chance. These people were put in place to take me down, Clint, and they were put on this team by Nick himself. One of my oldest and closest friends had me on a kill order, and you think that he did that with a smile? He did it because it was a decision that had to be made, not because it made him _happy_.”

Clint wasn’t stupid. It was smart to have Phil Coulson as a secret weapon in your back pocket if you had suspicions that your organization was infested with Nazis. Maybe it made sense, but that didn’t mean Clint had to appreciate the process. Not for one fucking second.

“Are you a danger, now?” Clint asked plainly.

Phil looked him dead in the eyes, and for a moment he was Agent Coulson again. “There will always be that possibility. This is uncharted territory.”

“But it’s less of a threat now, right? You don’t have urges to write alien graffiti on walls anymore. Why the fuck didn’t you tell us after that stopped? When you figured it out? When the whole Inhumans shit started going down? Why not after that? Don’t, _don’t_ , you dare say it was a matter of not having enough time, because I swear to god, I will walk right the fuck out.” Clint spat out the last part, using the last threat he had left in him, even as the idea of following through made him feel sick inside.

“How could I?” Phil exclaimed. “What do you want me to say? That I was afraid? That I was a coward? I was both. It had already been so long, and you had moved on, Clint. You all had. Who was _I_ to ruin that? To disrupt the life you made for yourself? Your team?”

 _You were Phil,_ Clint thought desperately, but his heart was screaming _you were_ _mine,_ even though that wasn’t true. It had never been true. He deflated.

“Did you ever want to?” Clint whispered. The abrupt shift from shouts to whispers should have been jarring, but it was nothing compared to watching Phil shatter in front of him.

It wasn’t a slow thing. All at once, Phil’s shoulders fell, slumping forward just enough to be noticeable, and his face fell harder. His eyes started to shine, then water, and Clint couldn’t see the details anymore because his own eyes were filling, too. He’d told himself he wasn’t going to cry, _dammit_.

“Every day. No matter how insane my days are, how long or hard or devastating, not a single one passes without me thinking about you. A memory, a feeling, even if I lock it away quickly, and push it aside for as long as I can, they don’t ever really leave me.” Phil shook his head, and he looked lost. “I thought about the possibilities, sometimes. What you’d say, or do, or how you’d look at me when you found out I was alive. You didn’t pull your punches like that in anything I thought up, though. Today was a surprise. Then again, it’s not as if you’ve ever been predictable.”

A broken, frustrated, exhausted sound came out of Clint, and he didn’t have a hope in hell of holding it back. He all but charged forward the small distance between them, throwing his arms around Phil and holding on with everything he had. He crushed Phil to his chest. Wrinkled the suit beyond saving, probably, fisting the material at Phil’s back in his hands and squeezing impossibly tighter.

Phil’s arms came around him without hesitation – Clint could feel them wrapping around his waist, fingers digging into the small of his back. It hurt in all ways imaginable, but Clint held on. He pressed his face into Phil’s neck and choked down another sob. The smell of the cologne was stronger here – Phil always used to put it on the back of his neck – and that small similarity between _then_ and _now_ broke any barrier Clint had left standing.

This was _Phil_. _His_ Phil. Fuck everything. All the rest of it was meaningless. He couldn’t have moved even if he’d wanted to, and there was no way in hell that he wanted to.

It was what he’d been afraid of all those years ago, of never wanting to let go once he started. But he never imagined it would feel so good to hold and be held like this, and he couldn’t bring himself to care. It felt right, for the first time in so long.

“I missed you,” Clint told Phil, his mouth pressed to the collar of Phil’s shirt. His voice still managed to sound ragged, anyhow.

The sigh that came out of Phil’s mouth was a broken kind of uneven, and it sent a shiver down Clint’s spine. “Nothing has felt right in years. Not to say that crying and shouting at each other feels _right_ , but…”

“But it does,” Clint finished for him. “More than you being stuck on the other end of a phone line, anyway. Or gone.”

Phil might have nodded then, Clint felt Phil’s head move against Clint’s, at any rate. “Do you want me to let go?” Phil asked.

The noise that came out of Clint’s throat was partially fearful, and also disturbingly close to a growl. He would have been far more embarrassed if he didn’t have the wet proof of Phil’s own tears on his neck. “You do, and I’ll kick you.”

“Can’t have that. Your shoes are pointy.”

“I was forced into them. It was violent.”

“I’m assuming this shirt was nice at one point, too, before you were shot at and burnt.”

“No, there were already bullet holes and knife tears in it when I came here.” Clint sniffed. “Haven’t gone shopping in a while.”

Phil paused and then started laughing. It was semi-hysterical, and Clint had to pull back a bit to check that Phil wasn’t cracking. He didn’t let go completely, though, and neither did Phil. Phil’s hands stayed loose on Clint’s waist, laughing so hard that he let his head fall onto Clint’s shoulder.

Clint couldn’t help smiling and chuckling against the side of Phil’s head. It was fucking insane. This whole day was insane. Bullet holes, and fire-men, and having Phil in his arms, and laughing together – totally insane, but not wholly unfamiliar.

“I’m sorry,” Phil managed, eventually.

Clint ran a hand up Phil’s back (he was full-on stroking Phil’s back, really, but he tried to pretend that wasn’t what he was doing). “If I had known emotional turmoil was all it took to get you to laugh like that, the amount of stupid shit I would have done back at SHIELD would escalated dramatically.”

“That’s a whole host of nightmare material I didn’t need.”

Clint snorted.

Phil straightened up, pulling back just a bit as he did, and as a result Clint’s hand was running up and down Phil’s side, before he could remind it to stop doing that. That was…not appropriate. Clint cleared his throat and let his hands fall, ducking his head before Phil could catch his expression, because he _knew_ Phil would pick up on the shit written all over his face if Clint gave him the chance.

He put his hands behind his back, gripping tight enough to keep them from doing something stupid, like fixing Phil’s tie or adjusting his collar, because Clint had made it crooked and there was just something inherently wrong about Phil Coulson standing in his own office with a crooked collar.

Clint didn’t know what to say, but that had never stopped him before. “I’m still pissed,” he said, finally.

Phil nodded. “I wasn’t under the impression one talk would somehow reverse time.”

Clint swallowed, and it hurt. “I wish I wasn’t.”

Phil just stared at him, not moving, and Clint wanted to scream. Anything was better than Phil giving him the _Coulson_ treatment right now, but then Phil spoke. “We’re different people from the ones who stayed up to watch the sunrise.”

Just like that, the memory came flooding back. It was right after the trip to New Mexico where Clint had seen Thor for the first time. Clint had been ordered off to the other side of the country but before he left, he and Phil had sat together, sharing a beer and watching the sun rise over the desert.

It had been the last bit of quiet downtime they had together before the Avengers assembled. The last time Clint saw Phil alone before his mind was no longer his own.

The words were falling out of Clint’s mouth the second they popped into his head: “I’m sorry.”

Phil blinked, frowning and visibly confused. “You’re sorry? Clint what do you-”

“It was me. The reason you died. I planned everything for him. And before you give me the _it was all Loki,_ spiel – I know. I know it wasn’t really me, I know I wasn’t in control, but I saw it, I felt it, I _wanted_ it. I orchestrated every second, used everything I knew, and it wouldn’t have happened like that if…”

Suddenly he was being hugged by Phil, and he lost all ability to form a sentence. Phil held him tight against his chest, and was shaking his head. “It wasn’t you. I understand, believe me, but don’t you dare take responsibility or guilt over choices I made. That’s an order.”

Clint laughed, one sharp sound. “I don’t work for SHIELD anymore.” He relaxed into the hug and it felt a little like melting. “I saw it happen after, you know. Watched the security footage about a dozen times.”

Phil tensed. “The Helicarrier?”

Clint nodded stiffly. “I watched you die. So many times. I watched you _die,_ Phil.”

Phil pulled back, still gripping Clint’s shoulders tight. “I’m here. I’m alive.” He looked like he was about to say something else, then stopped himself.

“Then why is this…”

“Complicated?” Phil guessed.

“I might have gone for the phrase, ‘a pain in the ass’,” Clint joked, but it fell flat when his voice caught on the end.

“I wasn’t sure you would even want to see me,” Phil admitted. Not even Clint’s mountain of insecurities could take away from the painful honesty Clint could see in him. Phil meant it, there was no denying that. Clint blinked in shock.

He almost said, _that’s the stupidest fucking shit I’ve ever heard_ , but then he remembered the last few weeks, where he’d agonized over that very question. Except, Clint _had_ known what he wanted, deep down. He’d just been scared out of his mind at what might be waiting for him when he made his move.

“I never stopped wanting to see you,” Clint told him honestly. If his voice was too rough, too honest, he stopped caring. Phil gave him a skeptical look, and Clint impulsively grabbed for Phil’s wrists. “No, shut up. I’ve wanted to see you since…since always. It wasn’t about not wanting to see you. It was…everything else. What the fuck was I supposed to think, huh? That I’d come here, and you’d hug me? After letting me think you were dead this whole time? That you ever cared about me the way that I…I…” he was breathing hard now, on that knife-point edge of panic.

“God, Clint,” Phil breathed out, eyes wide. Clint bet his own didn’t look so different right then. “Tell me what to do. Tell me what to say.”

“Isn’t that usually your job, boss?”

Phil laughed, but the pinch to his eye made it look like he might start crying again and Clint couldn’t take that. Clint tightened his grip around Phil’s wrists and reveled in the feeling of Phil’s steady pulse, firm and constant – and vaguely knew that was batshit crazy. It was a pulse, for fuck’s sake, and yet it was making Clint feel weak in the knees.

“As you’ve pointed out, I’m not exactly your boss.”

“I guess that’s good. That makes the whole hugging and crying thing a little less inappropriate, huh?” Clint joked, because his damn mouth had apparently been doing a good job for too long.

Phil opened his mouth at the same time that someone knocked on the door. Phil sighed, deep and resigned, before clearing his throat. He didn’t pull away from Clint immediately, though, and Clint tried and failed to not focus in on that.

“Is something on fire?” Phil asked, voice clear and commanding like the past hour hadn’t happened at all.

“We wouldn’t be, uh, interrupting unless it was necessary, Director,” said a deep, male voice from the other side.

Phil tilted his head at Clint, and Clint recognized the silent apology. That he still knew at least one of Phil’s signals was almost as jarring as _Director_. What the fuck?

Clint stared open-mouthed at him as Phil stepped back a polite distance and called the agent in.

The tall, dark, and handsome SHIELD agent that had been corralling club patrons stepped in with his hands behind his back and a sorry expression on his face. “Sorry again. Sir.”

Phil gestured for him to get on with it, and nope. No. Clint butted in with: “ _Director_?” before the agent could get another word out.

“Oh. Did I forget to add in that part?” Phil said offhandedly. As if he’d forgotten to mention his favorite fruit was now oranges. He was smiling a little, but it was tilted in an apprehensive sort of angle, and he was eyeing Clint like he was afraid something was about to explode.

“Yeah,” Clint deadpanned. Director? Director of SHIELD? Holy shit. If the evening had been any less traumatic, Clint that information would have seriously turned Clint on.

“Mack, you were saying?” Phil encouraged lightly while Clint scanned the room, readjusting his assessment of everything.

“There’s a problem at the Playground. We were pinged about the same time we got an encrypted message from Mockingbird, so we’re guessing it’s related.”

“Bobbi?” Clint asked, standing at attention instantly at her code name. “She’s ok?”

‘ _Ok’_ was little more than a vague concept at this point, but they all knew that. He hadn’t heard from her or about her since the fall of SHIELD. They’d been on friendly speaking terms after their breakup, but between his Avenging and her spy stuff, it’d been a long time since they’d seen each other in person. The relationship had been a disaster, but Clint had never been the type to just stop loving someone, even if he wasn’t _in_ love with them anymore.

Phil nodded stiffly, not looking at Clint when he answered. “She and Agent Hunter split off from our team a while back. Disavowed. But they’ve been keeping busy.”

“Disavowed,” Clint repeated coldly. “Thought you’d just leave that part out, too?” The only sign of Phil’s flinch at the jab was the tightening around his eyes. He still wasn’t looking at Clint.      

Mack cleared his throat. “Yeah. She and Hunter picked up some intel they thought we’d like our eyes on. Sent some files that Daisy and the wonder twins are going over now. May wants wheels up in ten.”

Phil nodded. “I’d say we don’t have much of a choice. Gather everyone for a briefing in the labs, we’ll patch Agent May in over comms. Oh, and check in on Moreau, make sure he knows we’re taking off. It would be a shame to have to switch out burnt sheets. Again. Bill might get another stress headache.”

Mack smirked. “It sounds like he’s already got one,” he joked, then nodded and promptly left the room.

“Do I want to ask who Bill is?” Clint wondered aloud.

“The late Agent Eric Koenig’s identical twin brother. One of them, anyway. Apparently, there are thirteen other Koenig brothers. Daisy is convinced they’re robots.”

Clint nodded. “Okay, so I didn’t want to ask.”

They stood there for a moment that felt longer than it should have, and then Phil looked at him again quickly, before looking away again and walking back around to root though his desk drawers. Except, in all the years Clint had known him, Phil didn’t _root_ for anything.

“Is the Playground the one in Massachusetts?” Clint asked, as if he didn’t already know.

“That’s classified. Yes.”

Phil was still digging around, looking increasingly frustrated, and Clint was just done. He was so, so done with it all. He wanted to sigh and wrap himself around Phil like an octopus, latching on for as long as it took to get that expression off his face: the worried, anxious, uncertainty lingering under the frustration that didn’t belong on Phil Coulson’s face.

But he didn’t do that.

Phil was the Director of SHIELD, and that meant something. It was incredible, and it made more sense than anything else in Clint’s life at that moment, but it changed things. Didn’t it?

He wished he could have been there to see it happen, to celebrate with Phil and congratulate him. Toss streamers and confetti from the rafters, and generally aggravate the closeted neat-freak inside of Phil.

It also made Clint feel a little lost. It was a reminder of everything Phil was, and everything Clint wasn’t – would never be – but it made too much sense for Clint to resent that. Clint was just a guy, after all. An ex-freelancer playing at being a superhero because he was good with his hands and had great eyesight and even better friends.

And Phil was made to lead. Made for SHIELD. Made to be…

Clint cleared his throat and stuck his hands behind his back again. It didn’t make him feel that much stronger, but it was something, and it made him stand taller. “You have places to be. And I have a Hawkeye to get to before she starts repainting the inside of the cockpit with spilt nail polish, again. That stuff’s a bitch to clean up. I don’t know why she tries to paint her nails in the jet, honestly, she’s…”

He trailed off as Phil stood up, looking shell shocked with his eyes wide and blinking. “We spent all our time talking about me, and I’ve heard nothing about _your_ life,” Phil said stiffly.

Clint shrugged. “Makes sense. I came here for you.”

And the biggest difference Clint had seen between the Phil before his death and the Phil now was that he let his expressions bleed through his Coulson mask.

It jabbed Clint in every open inch of his heart.

“You…came here to get answers,” Phil said, almost like a question, almost like a correction.

Clint let out a laugh that hurt on the way up. “I told myself that, sure. And, yeah, I wanted answers, no shit. But I could have gotten answers from you over one of Tony’s secure lines. He’s the most paranoid person on the planet when it comes to security. His people’s security, anyway, not so much his own” Clint corrected himself. He cleared his throat before finishing full steam ahead as if his voice wasn’t so gruff; “I came here because I wanted to see you. I came for _you_. You’re more important than the reasons you left. Always have been.”

Maybe it hurt more because it was true, or because he’d been burying that truth as far down as he could force it for too long. All Clint knew what that when he looked into Phil’s eyes, he felt like he could drown right there in Phil’s office with no water in sight.

“T-minus five minutes to wheels-up,” May’s disembodied voice said from somewhere in the ceiling.

That jarred them both from the vacuum seal of the moment. “Unless you intend to take a trip to Massachusetts,” Phil started, grabbing a thumb drive that Clint would bet he’d found long before now, and walking toward the door with stiff shoulders.

“Uh, no. Then there’d only be one Hawkeye in the world, because the other one would shoot me. Stranding her would piss her off. She’s not even close to being as good a pilot as I am.”

“Very few people are,” Phil said simply, like the it was just the simple truth and didn’t make Clint’s chest feel ten times lighter.

They stopped there in the doorway, right in the middle, maybe two inches separating their chests, and it wasn’t uncomfortable in the way it probably should have been.

“You gonna answer when I call, next time?” Clint asked.

Phil blinked, openly surprised. Clint’s heart rate was going to have to get used to seeing all those emotions. “Unless there’s a firefight, in which case I’ll have to call you back.”

Clint grinned, and it maybe didn’t reach all the way right then, but it felt like it could. Like the potential for a full-on dopey grin was in his future, and that was something else. “Ditto. It, uh. It sucks that I have to go. But I have to go. And it sucks. A lot. I still can’t…” he felt his fingers twitch from pulling back on the urge to reach out.

He felt the out-of-body realization that that was fucking stupid. How many times had he dreamed of the chance to be able to do that? How many promises to himself that if he could, he would, any time, any place. If he could go back and hug Phil just once, he would have given it all away.

He rolled his eyes at himself, saw Phil’s lips start to form an unfairly adorable press of confusion, and then he was tugging Phil’s arm to pull him in and hold on tight. Clint wrapped one arm around Phil’s shoulders and snuck the other one around his waist and stopped giving a single fuck about everything but that.

He definitely gave a few fucks about the way Phil’s arms mirrored his, though. The way Phil breathed in deep and sighed, leaning into Clint that much more.

“Natasha will want to see you, too,” Clint told him, ignoring the way Phil’s shoulders stiffened.

“She called earlier. Told me to tell you that she understands. She didn’t say what about, but I’m assuming you know.”

Ah. Yeah, he better get ready for an earful when he got home for leaving like he did. “I do. But look, don’t go pulling a disappearing act again, okay? Because we’ve been there, done that, and now it’s old hat. It’s lame. Can’t repeat the same thing over and over, you know? She’d also kill me if you did, and that would be a bummer.”

“She didn’t join you this time,” Phil seemed to argue.

“No,” Clint agreed, and squeezed Phil once more, trying to convince himself it wouldn’t be the last time. He pulled back and couldn’t quite manage to crack a smile. “But she will. In her own time.”

Phil nodded stiffly. “Of course.”

Clint could tell he didn’t believe it, and then Clint was terrified the Phil didn’t believe _Clint_ would come back, either. “This isn’t a goodbye. I don’t do those. I’m shit at them. We aren’t doing that.”

Phil’s barely-there smile made Clint’s heart clench, but in a good way this time. “Not a goodbye. I’ll take care of this situation and then…”

“Try to make plans?”

“I’ll do my level best to make plans.”

“Well, if I’m getting Phil Coulson’s best, it’s pretty much a done deal.” They heard the engines kick up a notch and Clint cursed. “That’s my cue. Okay. Going now. See you…when I see you,” he said, rushing through the pathway he’d memorized on his way in turning back once his feet hit the tar to see Phil standing in the opening.

He waved as the door closed.

“Not goodbye. Not goodbye. Not goodbye,” he muttered to himself as he watched the plane take off and disappear under the cloaking tech.

He kept up the mantra all the way back to Kate, feeling his heart in his throat with every step.

When she opened the door, she didn’t say a word, didn’t beg for details or demand answers. Kate smiled and stuck back in her headphones, kicking out her foot to nudge his knee as they settled back in the cockpit. It was only when he heard something fall onto the floor that he realized Phil had slipped him the thumb drive at some point in their hug. If he’d been alone, the laugh he let out at that might have been a hell of a lot closer to a sob.

Clint wished the welcome reception back at the Tower would be half as easy as that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for still reading with the unpredictable posting schedule, you guys are rad <3
> 
> This was a fun one to write, and a bit of a trickier one, too. If you're mad they didn't smooch, don't worry. The story has this rating for a reason.

**Author's Note:**

> I gotta say, my secret love in canon and fics alike is Clint taking the lead. He doesn't do it often these days, but when he does, hell yeah. But I also think him leaning on people is a strength, tbh. Normally, Nat would be all over the planning, we know this, but in this scenario it's personal for Clint in a different way than it is for her, and so I have her taking more of a support role. Which might be interesting but...who knows if she'll be great at that...you never know...
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at meganmazing, though I'm not on there as often
> 
> This is currently sitting at 51k, so there is plenty more to come. Fair warning. Thanks for reading <3


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